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OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

AND SOME OF ITS 
DEEPER WATERS 



BY 



FRANCIS WHITING HALSEY 

AUTHOR OF "THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER' 



'; 



':- 







NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1902 






THF LIBRARY »f 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copiea ."TEcervp* 

MAR 31 t902 

Cr*vo»#«rr pwtbv 

CL«SS ft,XXc NO. 

COPY s. 



Copyright, 1902, 
By DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY. 

Published March, 1902. 



Norfoooti 3Pmss 

J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 

Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



TO 

L. H. 

WITH HER BROTHER'S BEST LOVE 



For permission to reprint so much of this volume 
as originally appeared in the New York Times and 
its Saturday Review of Books, in the Critic, the Book 
Buyer, the Independent, and the St. Paul Globe, the 
author desires sincerely to thank the owners of those 
publications. 

In a sense this comprises a considerable part of 
the contents — probably as much as two-thirds ; but 
the matter has been thoroughly readjusted, expanded, 
ind rewritten from new points of view. 



CONTENTS 
PART I 

PHASES OF THE INUNDATION 

PAGE 

I. The Enormous Output 3 

II. Causes 9 

III. Pecuniary Rewards 20 

IV. The Great Unknown 29 

V. Yellow Journalism in Literature ... 43 

VI. Courts of Appeal 48 

VII. Impossible Academies 57 

VIII. Modern Editing 63 

IX. The Mechanical Side of Books 77 

X. Librarians and their Influence ... 86 

XL The Pathos of a Master's Fate ... 94 

XII. The Burning Question 104 

PART II 

DEEP WATERS AND MAIN CHANNELS 

I. Books that live on through the Years . 115 

II. Writers and Something More . . .122 

III. Biographies that are Histories . . . 133 



CONTENTS 



IV. Fashions in Collecting . 

V. Profits in Rare Books 

VI. Parkman and Some of his "Sources' 

VII. Scott's Surviving Popularity . 

VIII. Memoirs and Memoir Writers 

IX. Burns as an Edinburgh Lion . 

X. Pepys, the Little and the Great . 

XI. Chesterfield, the Forgotten and the 

MEMBERED 

XII. Lord Herbert of Cherbury . 
XIII. Gibbon's Solitary Grandeur . 

Index 



Re- 



page 
150 

160 

172 

179 

184 

198 

206 

214 
224 
233 

247 



PART I 
PHASES OF THE INUNDATION 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



THE ENORMOUS OUTPUT 

It is a universal and much-expressed regret that 
the literary output has of late years become almost 
a flood. On all sides one hears complaints of it. 
Men and women are perplexed to know where they 
shall begin their reading and where end it The 
books published in Great Britain alone now number 
each year 6000, and perhaps they have gone up to 
7000, of which only about 1500 are new editions. 
These figures have not yet been reached in America, 
but they have been very nearly approached ; so that 
in the two countries we have each year about 11,000 
books, though many of these are necessarily counted 
twice, having been brought out in both continents. 

In some other lands the figures are still more for- 
midable, — in Italy, 9560; in France, 13,000; in Ger- 
many, 23,ooo. 1 Le Droit d* Auteur has estimated the 

1 It is important here to bear in mind the custom in Italy, France, 
and Germany of recording as books thousands of publications which 
scarcely rank as books in our meaning of the word. Dr. E. C. Rich- 
ardson, the librarian of Princeton University, has pointed out that 
among the 9500 Italian books are 4000 which have fewer than twenty- 
five pages each, while of the French total " more than half are pam- 
phlets under the American definition." He shows further that were 

3 



4 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

number published in the whole world for a single 
year at the enormous total of 70,554. With all de- 
ductions made for new editions and translations, 
these figures remain sufficiently impressive. No sane 
man not engaged in making catalogues could possi- 
bly interest himself in any considerable number of 
these books. Men having widely varied interests and 
sympathies are necessary in the creation of a market 
for books published in such thousands. Many are, of 
course, technical books and school books ; others are 
directories, privately printed books, catalogues, and 
so on; so that, depressing as the outlook for good 
literature may remain, it is obviously not so bad as 
the total would make it appear. 

It is now a full generation since the public began 
to be overwhelmed with books ; indeed, a few statistics 
will show how enormous has been the increase in 
books, even within the lifetime of many persons still 
living. From the invention of printing until the 
beginning of the sixteenth century, it is believed 
that not more than 30,000 books had been produced 
in the whole world. As evidence of the rate of 
growth from that time until the middle of the nine- 
teenth century the number of books offered at the 
German fairs every twenty-five years is interesting. 

the same standards employed in this country, we should have far 
higher American totals, there having been copyrighted in the year 1899 
15,215 publications which in a sense could be called books, but of 
which only 5834 were books of a substantial kind. In addition, Dr. 
Richardson believes there are produced in this country each year at 
least 10,000 pamphlets of twenty-five pages or more each. 



THE ENORMOUS OUTPUT 5 

In 1650 only 948 books were shown, and there was 
no marked increase until 1725, when the total rose 
to 1032, and in 1750 to 1290. But with the opening 
of the new century an advance was made to 4012, 
while in 1846 the total reached 10,536. In this coun- 
try, from 1640 until 1776, a period of 136 years, the 
output, including almanacs, sermons, and laws, was 
only about 8000, while for the twenty-four years be- 
tween 1876 and 1900 the "American Catalogue" was 
able to record as then in print 170,000 books, and 
for the single year 1900 the Trade List Annual gave 
a total of 150,000 titles. 1 

Books as they come from the press are in fact 
fast becoming what many newspapers and maga- 
zines have been — publications whose term of life is 
ephemeral. They exist as the favourites of a month, 
or possibly a year ; then, having had their brief sum- 
mer-time of success, they silently go their destined 
way. Oblivion overwhelms them. Not ten per cent 
of any one year's books can hope to linger a year 
after their publication in the popular memory even 
as names. 

As a matter of fact the writing of books has de- 
generated into a sort of habit, which has been steadily 
growing upon the human race for some years. Time 
was when to have written a book gave a person some 
degree of distinction. Men and women were pointed 
out as authors, and their books, once named in edu- 

1 For these figures the author is indebted to his friend, Mr. A. 
Growoll, managing editor of the Publishers' Weekly. 



6 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

cated circles, were recognized; but that time has 
measurably gone by. To have written a book now- 
adays is to have done what thousands of others have 
done, or are at present busily engaged in doing. It 
amounts to little more than does the statement that 
some person has designed a new building, invented a 
labour-saving machine, or constructed a new kind of 
street-car rail. 

Meanwhile, though the publishers never before were 
so deluged with manuscripts, there is something to 
be thankful for in the fact that only a very small 
proportion of the writing activity going on ever finds 
representation in printed books. A few years ago 
Frederick Macmillan declared publicly in London 
that his house in one year had accepted only 22 
manuscripts out of 315 submitted. Another pub- 
lisher put his average of acceptance far lower : it 
was only 13 for 500 submitted. Inclined as we may 
be to blame the publishers for our deluge, these facts 
show us how substantial is our debt to them. They 
have served us most effectually as a dam. 

Other figures may appall us still more. The ca- 
pacity of the book-printing houses and binderies of 
New York has been reckoned to be 100,000 volumes 
per week. It is believed that another 100,000 vol- 
umes in school books and cheaply made books could 
also be produced in one week. One New York house 
has been known to take an order on Monday morn- 
ing to manufacture 2000 copies of a book containing 
350 pages by the following Wednesday night. The 






THE ENORMOUS OUTPUT 7 

type was all set in a single night ; next day the presses 
were started, and on the third day the covers were on 
the books. By the end of the week, 10,000 copies 
had been turned out. 

Authors themselves have caught this fever and 
habit of rapid production. Once fame has come to 
them, they strive more and more to meet the demand 
for their writings, — a process certain to ruin their 
art; and yet few withstand the temptation. One 
author records, as if he were proud of the achieve- 
ment, that he can regularly produce 1000 words in 
a day. Another can write 1500, while the most 
accomplished of all in that line can produce 4000. 
Trollope told us he could average 10,000 words a 
week, and when pushed could more than double the 
output. Writing done at this rate of speed is not 
literature and cannot be. It is simply job work, the 
work of day labourers, — in no sense the work of 
genius or inspiration. 

Confiding readers who may indulge a belief that 
some of the popular books of the day of this descrip- 
tion are to remain fairly permanent additions to Eng- 
lish literature, should recall to their minds the titles 
of some of the most popular favourites of half a cen- 
tury or more ago. Here are an even dozen such : 
"Ringan Gilhaize," by John Gait (1823); "The 
Pilgrims of Walsingham," by Agnes Strickland 
(1825); "Two Friends," by the Countess of Bless- 
ington (1825); "Now and Then," by Samuel War- 
ren (1848); "Over Head and Ears," by Dutton 



8 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Cook (1868); " Temper and Temperament," by Mrs. 
Ellis (1846); "Modern Society," by Catharine Sinclair 
(1837); "Wood Leighton," by Mary Howitt (1836); 
"Round the Sofa," by Mrs. Gaskell (1859); "The 
Lost Link," by Thomas Hood (1868); "Lady Her- 
bert's Gentlewoman," by Eliza Meteyard (1862); 
"Called to Account," by Annie Thomas (1867). 

Few readers now living know anything of these 
books. The younger generation probably never 
heard of one of them. At the same time, there 
came from the publishers other books in small edi- 
tions of which the fame is greater now than it ever 
was — those of Ruskin, Tennyson, Emerson, Haw- 
thorne, and Carlyle, which have become permanent 
additions to the glory of the English tongue. 



~*i 



II 

CAUSES 

The causes of our deluge, once we reflect on the 
intellectual history of the past twenty or thirty years, 
are plainly to be seen. They lie in the greater effi- 
ciency of the common schools, the increase in attend- 
ance at colleges, the enormous growth of libraries, 
free and otherwise, the spread of such systems of 
instruction as are provided at Chautauqua, the growth 
of periodical literature, from reading which the public 
passes by a natural process of intuition to reading 
books, the free travelling libraries, and along with 
these causes the very important one of the general 
decline in the cost of printing books and magazines. 
To get an education has become the mere matter of 
taking the time to get it. One lies within the reach 
of all who seek it. How keen and widespread has 
become the appetite for reading is seen in the famil- 
iar fact that popular magazines find their largest sup- 
port in small and distant communities. Many purely 
literary periodicals have their subscribers scattered 
through small towns from Maine to Texas, from Florida 
to the state of Washington. Readers in such localities 
have become a mainstay of book publishers also. 

The natural outcome of this is a tremendous growth 
9 



10 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

in the number of those who know how to write; 
who have acquired ideas, power to express themselves, 
and self-confidence in saying what they think in print. 
Names often appear on title-pages that were unknown 
before, even to periodical literature. Many of these 
writers for years had been acquiring rich stores of 
knowledge, with literary taste and literary feeling. 
They have written out of full minds, — as amateurs, 
it is true, but showing real love and knowledge of 
books, clearness of understanding, joyousness in 
work, culture, purpose, power. 

Then again, books have become more attractive to 
the eye. It is beyond dispute that they are better 
manufactured everywhere, both as to print, binding, 
and cover design. Even the ordinary novel is more 
certain to have a cloth than a paper cover. Paper 
covers as an infliction have definitely passed away. 
Perhaps the most disastrous failure the book trade 
has ever seen was made by a house which in the 
last years of its existence poured them forth with 
unrestrained profusion. Its failure in considerable 
degree was due to the unprofitableness of paper- 
bound books. Cheap as they were, the public would 
not buy them. Nor has the adoption of cloth covers 
in any way tended to lessen the quantity of books 
published, but quite the contrary. Improved methods 
of distribution meanwhile have sprung up, mainly in 
the department stores and in methods of advertising, 
through which have been made possible enormous 
sales never known before. 



CAUSES I I 

England has presented conditions that have oper- 
ated favourably in other ways. Less expensive books 
have come from that country; not paper-covered 
ones, but a single volume where formerly there were 
three. After a brave and long-extended fight worthy 
of a better cause, the three-volume novel has received 
its death-blow. It is not many years since book-buy- 
ing in England was a pursuit possible only to men 
with money to spare; but the buying of a popular 
book is as feasible to a lean English purse now as it 
is to an American. 

Moreover, it has become very easy to get a book 
printed, being a mere question of paying a printer, 
and ordinarily $300 will be quite sufficient. Paper, 
type-setting, and binding have all been growing 
cheaper. We have actually no safeguards except 
the cost. The mind is bewildered when it contem- 
plates the stores of books the Library of Congress 
must eventually contain, — those it now contains and 
those it will have added to its store when present 
conditions have prevailed some generations longer, — 
a few kernels of wheat lost in heaps of chaff. 

Another contributing cause has been foreign wars 
and what we call territorial expansion. Men's inter- 
ests and their visions have been widened. New 
activity has gone into the literary habit as into most 
other occupations, and here we encounter a familiar 
fact in history. In the life of nations it is times of 
war and times just subsequent to them that have seen 
produced some of the most famous books of the 



12 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

world. Prolonged periods of peace have often been 
marked by few books, and notably by commonplace 
and unimportant ones. From the Napoleonic wars 
date the poems and some of the early prose writings 
of Scott, many of Coleridge's poems, Wordsworth's 
and Byron's — some of the greatest names English 
literature gathered to her roll of honour in the last 
century. Nor do these names exhaust the possible 
list : Landor, Lamb, and Southey belong also to that 
period. England's earlier conflict, when she warred 
with her colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, would 
tell a similar story. Burns was then writing his 
songs, Boswell collecting material for his biography, 
and Gibbon telling his story of a great nation's de- 
cline and fall. France herself, from the outbreak of 
the Revolution until the battle of Waterloo, a period 
of twenty-six years of almost constant warfare, saw 
produced some of the best-remembered works in 
modern French literature. 

Details from the totals of books published, when 
carefully studied, afford gleams of hope. Books of 
theology, poetry, and education have remained about 
the same in numbers from year to year; but there has 
been shown in this country an increase of as many 
as 200 among historical books and ioo among new 
novels, with still greater increase among reprinted 
novels, which of course points to interest in stand- 
ard fiction, and of these the increase has recently 
been 200. 

These figures will not surprise those accustomed to 



CAUSES 13 

observe tendencies. Novel-writing has been a grow- 
ing pursuit, and no signs of decay appear. But it is 
the novel of adventure and of history that gains the 
warmest welcome. No writers find such rewards as 
do successful writers of these books ; nowhere, indeed, 
is more notable literary art now in evidence. Men 
and women, after all, are interested in nothing so 
deeply as in human nature — its fortunes, history, 
manifestations, and possibilities. To the end of time 
fiction will be universally read. The tales found in 
old Egypt, the folk-lore that pervades the literature 
of every land and epoch, proclaim how wide this 
interest has been in the past, and sales of novels 
proclaim how permanent it still remains. 

The greatest source of gratification respecting fic- 
tion, however, may be derived from the increase in 
the number of reprints. Samuel Rogers once re- 
marked, " When a new book comes out I read an old 
one." The public obviously begins to follow his 
example to some purpose. How rich a storehouse 
exists to be opened up each year for the delight and 
admiration of readers ! We may not hope in our 
time to see produced again such work as the 
masters did, though an occasional example may 
be produced worthy of mention ; but with Fielding, 
Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and all that noble com- 
pany of the dead who still live, the time need never 
come when readers will actually lack for good novels 
to read, or publishers for good ones to reprint. 

In the increase among books of history doubtless 



14 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

lies the most suggestive fact. This reflects known 
conditions. Never before have historical studies 
been so popular with so many classes of persons. 
Not only are the graver and grander topics receiving 
unwonted attention, but the minor ones, the local 
annals, the annals of industries and organizations, 
and those of individual lives ; and this increase prom- 
ises to become even greater before it declines. The 
fields yet to be explored are many and the material 
worth the finding is of vast amount. 

A distinctive feature of books in this country has 
been those relating to our own history, whether they 
were fiction or more sober history. Here we see 
disclosed the interest in our own storied past which 
the patriotic societies have done so much to foster. 
The tendency will scarcely stop here. The next step 
seems almost inevitably to be the writing of better 
local histories. Out of this are already coming in- 
centives to the several states, our own included, to 
print their historical records, which have so long 
been permitted to rest in archives hidden from the 
public gaze. 

Fiction now embraces over twenty-five per cent of 
the whole number of books published. History and 
biography combined are next on the list. Theology 
stands third and music last. The classification shows 
conclusively how men and women are interested in 
nothing so deeply as in the vital aspects of their own 
race — its past, present, and future — books relating 
to human life as pictured in fiction, as lived in the 



CAUSES 15 

past, and as it may be hereafter. The growth of 
this interest has clearly been commensurate with the 
spread of universal education. 

Nearly one-half of all the books published come 
under these three headings. The relative numbers 
represent in what seems due proportion the various 
orders of mind found among men and women. Fic- 
tion appeals to the largest number, because it appeals 
most powerfully to the lower grades of intelligence. 
History properly comes next, and theology, in which 
only the least common minds take interest, comes last. 

Very notable in all this growth has been the rise 
of New York to its supreme place as a publishing 
centre. Early in the last century Philadelphia held 
the chief place in rank. Supremacy then passed 
to Boston. During the last quarter of a century the 
publishing business has become more and more one 
of the distinctions of New York. Statistics on this 
subject, compiled a few years ago, are interesting. 
They came from what may be accepted as authentic 
sources, and gave the number of books published by 
a few leading houses in the United States. 

The list was imperfect in some important respects. 
It omitted a large English house now on an Ameri- 
can business foundation, and all the houses in Chi- 
cago, where the importance of publishing interests is 
growing. One large Boston house was also omitted, 
and smaller firms there and elsewhere. But the 
statement as far as it went was extremely interesting, 
disclosing as it did the ascendency of New York as 



1 6 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

the book centre of the whole country. Here we had 
654 books from New York, with only 150 from Bos- 
ton and 113 from Philadelphia. 1 

It is impossible that the inclusion of all the houses 
in the country in these lists would have modified 
New York's overwhelming lead. The one English 
house omitted would alone have offset for New York 
nearly all the houses from Boston. It would be 
entirely safe to affirm that more than two-thirds of 
all the books published in the country now come 
from New York. Had we at hand corresponding 
figures for magazines, the showing would be equally 
favourable to New York. Boston has only one maga- 
zine of distinct rank to set down, and Philadelphia 
only one. 

It is also in New York that the most important 
sales of books at auction take place. Boston, for 
example, in all its book history down to 1899, had 
witnessed the sale of only thirty-six books that 
fetched as much as $200, whereas in New York had 
been sold 275 books for that sum or a larger one. 
From the point of view of totals realized for collec- 
tions sold, the results are equally striking in their 
showing of the supreme place New York holds. 

1 It appeared that D. Appleton & Co. were first among the houses 
named, having produced 123 books in the year. Then came Charles 
Scribner's Sons with 121, the J. B. Lippincott Company with 113, 
Houghton, Mifflin and Company with 104, Longmans, Green & Com- 
pany with 104, Dodd, Mead and Company with 101, Harper & 
Brothers with 89, G. P. Putnam's Sons, with 46, and the Century Com- 
pany with 31. 



CAUSES 1/ 

This concentration of literary interests in one place 
has operated as concentration always does, in facili- 
tating methods of distribution. Combined with the 
magazines and literary periodicals, now so numerous 
in New York, it has been a very active force in the 
popularization of books as reading-matter. 

Amid these new and potent factors in contempo- 
rary literature have come changes in methods of 
selling books. No more remarkable influence has 
entered the trade than the influence of the dry-goods 
stores, where departments devoted to the sale of the 
day's popular books have grown to large proportions. 
Probably the regular book-stores in their totals of 
trade have not really suffered. What they have 
lost in one direction, they may have made up in 
others, — for one thing in what are known as col- 
lector's books, for another in fine editions, well- 
bound books, and in limited editions. Moreover, it 
should always be remembered that the number of 
persons who buy books has enormously increased. 
The number of books published and the sales of suc- 
cessful books present striking contrasts to the corre- 
sponding totals for ten and twenty years ago. Such 
sales as Du Maurier and Maclaren, Hall Caine and 
Kipling, Stevenson, Churchill, Paul Leicester Ford, 
and Mrs. Ward have had, were then absolutely un- 
known. 

The larger view of this change will scarcely 
awaken regrets. Even houses which have suffered 
from it have probably seen a way to other profits 



1 8 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

and to other methods bringing compensations. The 
public has bought more books and has read more; 
the general level of knowledge and culture has cor- 
respondingly been raised. And this increase will 
continue. More and more men are acquiring the 
laudable habit of buying a book as cheerfully as they 
buy a handful of cigars, and women as willingly as 
they buy a pair of gloves. 

Meanwhile the need remains for some step by 
which the small bookseller, dealing in current litera- 
ture, may have his trade restored to him. Wide 
interest has accordingly been taken in the action of 
leading publishers in making an agreement which 
shall cause its members to deal in copyrighted books, 
exclusive of fiction, at net prices. Members of the 
association they have formed desire to restore book- 
selling to its old-time dignity and usefulness (a dig- 
nity which it now possesses in Germany through 
legislative enactment) by maintaining uniform prices. 

As everybody knows, the small bookseller has not 
been able to maintain his own when a department store 
in his neighbourhood or out of it has found it conven- 
ient to cut prices, sometimes merely for advertising 
purposes, looking for profits from other articles sold 
to customers who came to buy books and lingered 
to purchase other things. The book departments 
in general stores have become so important that 
it is believed their proprietors are willing to main- 
tain them on their own merits and profits. In fact, 
members of the association believe that the depart- 



CAUSES 19 

ment stores will in the end find it more profitable to 
maintain prices at the point where they are held by- 
regular booksellers. Success for this action will 
promise success for the cause which its publishers 
have made it to represent — the cause of the book- 
seller, the man who is only now and then a publisher, 
and of whom there are thousands of representatives 
in this country that have been threatened for some 
years with eventual annihilation. 



Ill 

PECUNIARY REWARDS 

The sale from the Arnold collection, in May, 1901, 
of a copy of the first edition, containing the first title- 
page, of Milton's " Paradise Lost," for $830, may or 
may not be the highest price that will ever be paid 
for a copy of that scarce book; but it starts remi- 
niscences of the strangely unequal rewards which 
authorship has given from the earliest to the latest 
times. The money paid to Milton for the copy- 
right of that poem was exactly $50, in instalments of 
$25 each, his estate afterward receiving an addi- 
tional $25. 

Along with this item may be placed the statement 
that Nansen, from one of his books describing his 
Polar explorations, was understood to have received 
not less than $100,000. Writing books sometimes 
pays, but the rewards often stand in curious relation 
to the fact whether the book is pure literature or 
mere descriptive writing on a topic in which there 
happened to be some world-wide interest. Nansen 
did not get his money simply for writing his book ; 
he got it for going farther north than any other man 
had gone, for living in Arctic parts during a pro- 
longed season, and for reaching home sound and 



PECUNIARY REWARDS 21 

well to tell his tale. From Stanley's books the same 
moral could be drawn. 

Milton was an explorer into an unknown world. 
He went farther among the possibilities of the Eng- 
lish tongue than any other man save one had gone 
before him. The world, however, did not know what 
he had done until long afterward. He, in the mean- 
time, had sold his book for what he could get, and 
the world, when it saw what he had accomplished, 
no longer had a chance to reward him. Nansen and 
Stanley created their public before they wrote their 
books ; Milton, after he had written his and sold the 
copyright. 

Nansen's success and Stanley's came not merely 
from the renown of their names, but from the deeds 
they had performed. An author may have a great 
name and yet fail to write a successful book. Stan- 
ley afterward published a volume called "Through 
South Africa." His fame had in no wise grown 
dim, and the land in which he won it was again his 
theme ; but his book awakened no interest whatever. 
Three weeks after its publication his own American 
publishers had not heard of it, and no American 
edition has ever been brought out. 

The secret of this indifference lay in the fact that 
Stanley recorded no great achievement. His book 
comprised merely a series of newspaper letters 
from a region fast passing into the list of well- 
ordered and prosperous states. It was cast aside, 
while James Bryce's weighty book on the same sub- 



22 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

ject, issued at the same time, aroused wide interest, 
bearing as it did to South Africa the relation which 
his " American Commonwealth " bears to the United 
States. Stanley's book was a commonplace travel- 
ler's chronicle, for which its author had created no 
public waiting to receive it. 

Wherever first editions have sold for great prices, 
the Kilmarnock Burns for $2800, Hawthorne's " Fan- 
shawe" for $412, Shelley's "Alastor" for $350, 
Goldsmith's " Vicar of Wakefield " for $630, Brown- 
ing's " Pauline " for $700, and Poe's " Tamerlane " 
for $2050, they were books for which, when first 
issued, there had not been created great demand. 
There was small sale for them, and hence they be- 
came scarce. An active demand afterward advanced 
the price. There will come to Nansen's book and 
to Stanley's, out of which fortunes were made, never 
any competition for first editions. A few years have 
already retired them from active places in book 
sales. Milton and Goldsmith, Burns and Shelley, 
Tennyson and Hawthorne, Longfellow and Poe 
meanwhile survive to charm new generations. Prices 
for first editions of their works will go higher still. 
Nansen and Stanley will survive perhaps as names 
on maps. Their deeds will get a few lines in the 
cyclopaedias, and that will be all. 

Strange, indeed, in other ways, have been the re- 
wards which literature has bestowed. When we 
think of the princely sums writers have earned in 
our day, Hall Caine, Kipling, Du Maurier, and Sien- 



PECUNIARY REWARDS 23 

kiewicz, not to name Mr. Churchill and Mr. Ford, 
it is startling to remember Burns and his immortal 
poverty, or Milton selling "Paradise Lost" for that 
picayune. A negro poet in our day, Paul L. Dun- 
bar, does better than Burns or Milton did. Scarcely 
a year had passed after his " Lyrics of Lowly Life " 
came out, when more than 5000 copies had been 
sold. He was the most widely read poet of a 
year. In England one of the magazines, following 
a French custom, had " crowned " a volume of verse 
by Stephen Phillips, and the newspapers chronicled as 
a great success the sale of 500 copies, with another 
edition of 700 as on the press. But here was the 
coloured man, whom nobody had crowned, boasting 
5000 copies. 

It is not poetry, nor is it other literature of a crea- 
tive kind, that wins the largest pecuniary rewards. 
It is usually the man who performs some great feat, 
perhaps in exploration, and then writes a book. It 
was this fact that made General Grant a most suc- 
cessful writer, made Stanley another, and Nansen a 
third. The returns these authors gained raised them 
to independence. 

Of all writings save those just named, it is fiction 
that yields the largest returns, because the sales are 
so enormous. The contrast between the returns 
which Gibbon received and those which poured into 
the lap of Scott would probably be as great, and per- 
haps even greater, were they writing in our times. 
With the increase Gibbon might now secure, there 



24 

would be corresponding increase for Scott. Froude 
in his later life had an ampler reward than Gibbon ; 
and ampler than Scott's have been the sales of 
Dickens and Thackeray, Mrs. Ward, Du Maurier, 
and Crawford. When " Saracinesca" a few years 
ago was announced as already in its one hundred 
and tenth thousand, " Mr. Isaacs " in its fifty-fifth, 
and " Sant' Ilario " (a sequel though it be) in its 
forty-fourth, one was tempted to count up what even 
the ordinary royalty would return to Mr. Crawford ; 
but here we might forget that the modern novelist 
often secures greater sums than a simple fixed royalty 
would have yielded, because he sells for a large lump 
sum on the "progressive royalty" plan. 

But even Mr. Crawford's sales have since been far 
outdone. In the late summer of 1901, the following 
reports were made for other books, as here named ; 
and these figures have, of course, been increased 
since then. 

David Harum 520,000 copies 

Richard Carvel 420,000 " 

The Crisis 320,000 " 

Janice Meredith 275,000 " 

Eben Holden 265,000 " 

Ouincy Adams Sawyer 200,000 " 

D'ri and I 100,000 " 

To Have and to Hold 285,000 " 

The Christian 200,000 " 

The Eternal City 100,000 " 

An English Woman's Love Letters .... 250,000 " 

Black Rock > 

The Sky Pilot } together nearly 500,000 



PECUNIARY REWARDS 2$ 

Even if we reckon the royalty on these books as 
only ten per cent, handsome sums of money were 
secured for writing them, sums which in authorship 
may be called princely. 

When we turn to Jane Austen, another series of 
facts confronts us. Before George Eliot's time and 
Charlotte Bronte's, she was unquestionably the great- 
est of female writers of fiction. But she died in that 
humble habitation in rural England quite ignorant of 
the fame her pen had won. Only four of her works 
had seen the light when she died, and for them all 
she had been paid less than $3500, and for one 
received only $750. One of her books had been 
returned unread, while another had been sold for $50 
to a publisher who was glad to return it unprinted 
and receive his money back. If recognition in her 
own lifetime was slight, when it came it was em- 
phatic, Scott speaking the loudest word — entirely 
sincere praise. In his diary Scott describes her talent 
as " the most wonderful I have met with." 

Not more than five years ago some letters were 
printed which had passed between Burns and one of 
his publishers, George Thomson. Thomson on one 
occasion sent Burns $5 for six songs — compensa- 
tion which, in its absurd smallness, surpasses what 
Hawthorne got for some of the " Twice Told Tales " 
— $3 each. At the time this Burns correspondence 
was published, there was sold in Edinburgh a copy of 
the Kilmarnock edition of " Poems Chiefly in the 
Scottish Dialect." It brought rather more than 



26 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

$2800 — a sum in excess of all that Burns ever 
received for all his writings — a sum, moreover, which 
in his lifetime might have purchased a splendid farm 
and made him an independent young Scotch laird. 

Late years have seen some changes in the spirit 
that prevails in the relations of authors and publish- 
ers — an unquestionable change in the proportion 
of profits the author receives. A better understand- 
ing each of the other's point of view has arisen, and 
greater willingness to make concessions. Advan- 
tages have resulted for both — advantages which we 
know to be considerable for authors (at least for the 
very popular ones) and which probably have not 
been unimportant for the publishers. In the early 
times differences that often were bitter led to accu- 
sations and assumptions that were far too sweep- 
ing. Because many publishers were rich and authors 
were commonly poor, it was hastily inferred that 
injustice had been done. This conclusion lost sight 
of the fact that a publishing firm might consist 
of two or three or five individuals only, while the 
authors for whom they had published books num- 
bered some hundreds. Two men, or three or five, 
who were publishers, had thus been made rich, while 
some hundreds of authors, while getting certain 
returns for their books, had not received enough to 
make them also rich. Had the result been otherwise 
and the authors become rich, much greater profits 
would obviously have been necessary. 

The question arises whether these hundreds of 



PECUNIARY REWARDS 2J 

authors got the proper proportion of the profits : did 
they as a body share as well as the body of two, or 
three, or five, in the firm of publishers ? We have 
no statistics to help us to arrive at any definite con- 
clusion regarding this ; but it would certainly be inter- 
esting could we know, for a period of, say, ten years, 
what proportion existed between the net profits of a 
successful publishing house and the total sum paid 
by that house to its authors for the same period. 
Here we should have facts of considerable service in 
forming conclusions. But there would still remain a 
source of grievance for the successful author, for he, in 
any such reckoning, would be the man who virtually 
paid for the mistakes of the publishers in bring- 
ing out books in which there was not profit, but an 
actual loss. 

It is unlikely that these grievances ever will be 
entirely adjusted so long as publishers remain a 
necessity. Obviously the author cannot do without 
them. Authors have often attempted to become pub- 
lishers and have usually failed and sometimes have 
failed memorably. Authors of great popularity have 
made the experiment, and they too have failed. The 
difficulty arises from the conditions in which an 
author's work must reach a market — in a sense, his 
work is raw material requiring manufacture, advertise- 
ment, and sale. It is unmarketable until it has been 
subjected to such treatment, and success in reaching 
literary markets comes of long experience. 

The publisher may be regarded as the agent of an 



28 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



author, employed to manufacture and sell for him, or 
as a servant in the sense that a lawyer or a doctor is 
the servant of those who employ him, or he may be 
viewed as a mechanic or tradesman, whose services 
the author seeks. But there exists one great differ- 
ence in the relation in most cases. The publisher as 
an agent is greater than the author as the principal ; 
he has the larger means, the more independence and 
power. All the same, it has been demonstrated by 
long experience that the author cannot dispense with 
him, and his wisest course will be to make the best 
terms with him that he can. 



IV 

THE GREAT UNKNOWN 

How little the world knows of its greatest men is 
probably better illustrated in literature than in any- 
other calling. One thing almost absolutely proven 
is that the greatest writers fail of immediate rec- 
ognition. Recognition starts from the top, or from 
what Matthew Arnold called "the saving remnant," 
and thence spreads slowly downward. The regard 
of the masses never creates real fame. What the 
masses create is notoriety, while fame comes from 
the recognition which the best minds bestow. It 
starts at the top, and the top maintains it, — a small 
group, silent but firm-set as granite, and it alone 
secures to any author a title to enduring remem- 
brance. How few are the men and women who 
ever read Milton or Homer, Dante or Shakespeare, 
in one generation, compared with those who read 
the popular novels by which authors may be made 
rich in a single year. Emerson many years ago put 
this truth in striking and concrete form when he 
said of Plato, that at no one time had Plato ever 
had more than a handful of readers, hardly enough 
to pay for printing his books, and yet his writings 
had come down through the centuries, to us, the 

29 



30 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

strangers of another age, " as though God brought 
them in His hands." 

Some of the foremost names in nineteenth-cen- 
tury literature illustrate what magnificent justice 
has come to writers who, in the morning of their 
work, were among the great unknown. We may- 
recall Emerson's early appreciation of Carlyle, 
which moved Carlyle to say he could hear only 
" one voice, the voice from Concord." Emerson 
caused to be issued here an edition of Carlyle's 
essays, and Carlyle returned the act of apprecia- 
tion by bringing out, in 1841, a London edition of 
the essays of lynerson. Nowhere in literature 
have we had a finer story than this — a tale of 
recognition, each of the other, which has since 
been beautifully confirmed by the whole world of 
culture. 

Emerson, said Carlyle in a preface, was perhaps 
not so remarkable for what he had said or done as 
for what he had not. With uncommon interest, 
Carlyle had learned that here was " one of those 
rare men who have, withal, the invaluable talent of 
sitting still." That an educated man like Emerson 
" should retire for long years into rustic obscurity, 
and, amid the all-pervading jingle of dollars, and 
loud chaffering of ambitions and promotions, should 
quietly, with cheerful deliberateness, sit down to 
spend his life, not in mammon worship or the 
hunt for reputation, influence, place, or any other 
advantage whatsoever, this," said that wise man 



THE GREAT UNKNOWN 3 1 

from Craigenputtoch, " when we get a notice of it, 
is a thing really worth noting." 

Of the long effort that it cost Carlyle to get a 
publisher for " Sartor Resartus," the public well 
knows ; but his six years' waiting with the " French 
Revolution" is not so familiar. In 1831 he wrote 
to Emerson that he might still succeed " in making 
some tolerable engagement — most probably with 
Mr. Murray " ; but two weeks later : " All manner 
of perplexities have occurred in the publishing of 
my poor book. The manuscript, like an unhappy 
ghost, still lingers on the wrong side of Styx; the 
Charon of Albemarle-street durst not risk it in his 
sutilis cymba; so it leaped ashore again." Still 
later he had reached the following depth of de- 
spair : " I have given up the notion of hawking my 
little manuscript book about any further ; for a long 
time it has lain quiet in its drawer, waiting for a 
better day. Sad fate ! to serve the devil and get 
no wages even from him." 

Here was a man of genius, forty-two years of 
age, who from his youth up had given his best 
thought and spirit to a literary life. At the uni- 
versity he had been first among his fellows ; and 
his industry in reading had been unexampled : the 
stories told of it would do justice to Buckle or 
Macaulay. Little as he did to gain attention, his 
splendid faculties and great acquirements for so 
young a man were acknowledged, and when he 
went away, the professors realized that their best 



32 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

student had gone. Here, moreover, was a man who 
had already done work which to this day remains 
among the finest products of his mind — those match- 
less essays that have been more widely read perhaps 
than anything else he ever wrote. 

Again, let us turn to Hawthorne, that chief master 
in prose composition whom America has produced, 

— in his time a veritable chief among the great 
unknown. 

Hawthorne's early life, previous to the publication 
of his "Twice-Told Tales," had had for its chief pur- 
suit during many years literary work. His known 
accomplishment does not by any means indicate a 
great amount of activity, but it is a reasonable cer- 
tainty that he produced far more than the world has 
known. He was extremely careful of his reputation 

— not the reputation he had, for he had pitifully little, 
but the reputation he hoped to acquire. The familiar 
facts connected with the publication of " Fanshawe," 
a book earlier by eleven years than the "Twice- 
Told Tales," clearly indicate this. He published the 
book anonymously, with a prophetic quotation on the 
title-page, "Wilt thou go on with me?" but it was 
scarcely more than off the press before he did every- 
thing he could to suppress it, so that a copy in the 
Arnold sale sold for over $400. 

Down to his last days Hawthorne's extreme care 
in all he wrote continued. He left several fragments, 
notably " The Dolliver Romance," " Septimius Fel- 
ton ? " and " Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," and of the latter 



THE GREAT UNKNOWN 33 

more than one draught. It was to one of these frag- 
ments that Longfellow referred in his poem, written 
soon after returning from Hawthorne's funeral : — 

Ah, who shall lift that wand of magic power 

And the lost clew regain ! 
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 

Unfinished must remain. 

The beginnings of Hawthorne's literary life illus- 
trate more forcibly than perhaps those of any other 
American author the difficult road which a literary 
genius in this country had to travel in his day. He 
received for these stories, contributed to The Token, 
only a few dollars each. But the collected volume 
of " Twice-Told Tales " will long contain about the 
choicest productions in the short-story line that our 
language has been enriched by. Between " Fan- 
shawe " and " The Scarlet Letter " passed a period 
lacking only one year of a quarter of a century, and 
it was not until "The Scarlet Letter " appeared that 
anything like proper recognition came to Hawthorne, 
that immortal story of which Dr. Holmes wrote two 
lines destined to long remembrance : — 

I snatch the book along whose burning leaves 
His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves. 

The Old Manse of Concord, now one of the most 
celebrated dwellings in New England, was Haw- 
thorne's home for three years when the world was 
persistently refusing to recognize the great writer 
who was writing for it. He piped to the world, as 
Curtis has remarked, and it did not dance ; wept to it, 

D 



34 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

and it did not mourn. His life in this dwelling was 
the most secluded possible. No one in Concord 
knew him, save Emerson and Thoreau, and they saw 
him but seldom. To the ordinary citizen he was a 
phantom and a fable. Some people really doubted 
if the house was occupied at all. Upon the rare 
occasions when the "wild romancer " was to be seen, 
it was a mere glimpse caught of him putting in seeds 
or sedately using the hoe in his garden. 

Curtis met him at a tea given at Emerson's house, 
where were gathered other persons of distinction. 
For some time he was " scarcely aware of a man who 
sat upon the edge of the circle, a little withdrawn, 
his head slightly thrown forward on his breast, and 
his bright eyes clearly burning under his black 
brow." All through the talk he sat silent as a 
shadow, " but looked like a kind of poetic Webster." 
When he went to the window and stood quietly there 
for a long time looking out upon the landscape, no 
appeal was made to him, no one looked at him ; the 
conversation went on, and his silence was respected. 
Fine as were the things said by others, " much finer 
things were implied by the dumbness of this gentle- 
man with heavy brows and black hair." Such was 
the isolation of that man of surpassing genius, — an 
isolation even when in the presence of his peers. 

Hawthorne described himself as " the obscurest 
man of letters in America." When "The Scarlet 
Letter" was first printed and something like fame 
reached him, the edition numbered only 5000 



THE GREAT UNKNOWN 35 

copies and was not made from stereotyped plates, 
so little faith had the publishers in a large sale. 
Hawthorne had already obtained recognition, but 
it came only from "the saving remnant," contempo- 
rary reviews, in which it was worth something in 
those days to get acknowledgment, being the means 
of its bestowal. The New England Magazine for 
October, 1834, described him as "a writer of some of 
the most delicate and beautiful prose ever published 
on this side of the Atlantic." Henry F. Chorley, a 
year later, in the London Athenceum, acknowledged 
his genius and reprinted three of his stories. In 
1837 the first volume of "Twice-Told Tales" had a 
long notice in the North American Review, written 
by Longfellow, who said it came " from the hand 
of a man of genius," and " everything about it has a 
freshness of morning and of May." His style had 
" exceeding beauty," and was " as clear as running 
waters are." 

Neglect of Hawthorne came from the reading 
world at large, not from men competent to judge his 
genius, and yet it was scarcely until the last quarter 
of his century, when he had long been dead, that he 
could have been called a popular author. It was not 
until then that a cheap edition of his works came 
from the press, or that he passed into the possession 
of an edition de luxe, and so could be said to have 
abandoned his place as one of the great unknown. 

Many of Hawthorne's stories first appeared in the 
Democratic Review, a magazine devoted to partisan 



36 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

interests and published in New York. For many 
years it issued a series of pictures, "with pen and 
pencil," in which the virtues of small and large party 
magnates were exalted. " Father " Ritchie's face indi- 
cates one of the mildest-mannered and most amiable 
of men, and gives slight evidence of the force and 
political sagacity for which he was so long eminent, 
— possibly a happy stroke on the artist's part to secure 
him against the aspersions of opposing partisans. 

More amusing still was a side, full-length view of 
Felix Grundy, Attorney-General under Van Buren, 
who was seated in a great arm-chair, his legs com- 
fortably crossed, a pen high over his ear, spectacles 
on his forehead, in one hand an uplifted manuscript, 
a table at his side laden with papers, broken en- 
velopes, and inkstand, an air of tremendous capac- 
ity for public affairs pervading the seated figure of 
Felix Grundy. Another portrait was of John For- 
syth, Secretary of State under Van Buren, who 
stood in a portico near a large column, with hat held 
against the hip, one arm akimbo, the other behind 
his back, the right leg thrown over the left, and a 
face bland, satisfied, and ready for action. Mr. J. R. 
Poinsett appeared behind the railing of a balcony, 
an American flag at his side, and in the attitude of a 
public speaker, with hand extended as if in harangue. 
Mr. W. C. Rives sat in the large corner of an old- 
fashioned sofa. One hand held a book, with fingers 
between the leaves ; the other, with the arm, rested 
carelessly on the back of the sofa, while upon his 



THE GREAT UNKNOWN 37 

spacious lap was spread out an enormous handker- 
chief. 

These men all made an imposing display of legs. 
There were legs crossed, legs bent to rest on tiptoe, 
legs carelessly thrown about with the freedom that 
did befit the statesmen of a free country. What a 
good time they had of it, when patronage and place 
had been brought to a science, when the Albany 
Regency carried matters with a high hand in the 
North, and Edwin Croswell, with his Argus, " Father" 
Ritchie, with his Enquirer, and Amos Kendall, with 
his Kentucky newspaper, manufactured public opin- 
ion for the whole country ! 

Alongside these portraits were printed many of 
Hawthorne's short romances. The enterprising pub- 
lishers made no portrait of him. Worse than all, 
they did not pay him for his work. Rives, Croswell, 
and Kendall before they died had seen their party 
repeatedly overthrown in a national election, and had 
quite outlived their reputations. But Hawthorne's 
fame was rising more and more. It continues still 
to rise, and long will. For many years these mag- 
nates have been dead and forgotten, while Haw- 
thorne remains a vital force in the literature of his 
country, having made a larger contribution to its 
permanent glory than the men who built the Penn- 
sylvania Railroad or the Western Union Telegraph. 

How much in line with this thought is the fame 
of Gilbert White, of whose book edition after edi- 
tion, and more than one of them resplendent, have 



38 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

come forth in the past five years. Meanwhile, many 
authors famous in White's day are quite unread, 
their names known only to the curious. 

White was an obscure curate, devoting his years 
to a garden and the fields about Selborne. There 
was nothing in Selborne any more than there was in 
scores of other English villages that should have 
made it a place to write a book about. Remote from 
great towns, it stood unknown. White himself was 
even less known. His own townsmen had scarcely 
any acquaintance with him. To the most of them 
he was incomprehensible, with those strange, silent, 
industrious ways of his, doing work that promised no 
reward, the most unworldly of men. 

And yet it is White who has done for Selborne what 
no other man has done for a small village by writing 
about its natural history, — made it world-famous, 
and made himself one to whom a statue might well 
be lifted up. Stratford, Ecclefechan, Alloway, Con- 
cord, — these are villages to which has fallen renown, 
because greater writers were born in them or lived in 
them. Selborne's renown is due to Selborne's story, 
as an obscure curate told it, — a story of natural his- 
tory, set down with care, simplicity, and love. 

The great unknown, I have called these men, be- 
cause unknown in their own day to the great masses 
of readers. Meanwhile the world has possessed 
another type of the great unknown, — writers widely 
read by the masses but who have remained strangers 
to "the saving remnant." In recent years we have 



THE GREAT UNKNOWN 39 

thought of Kipling, Hall Caine, Howells, Sienkie- 
wicz, Stockton, Churchill, when successful authors 
were under discussion. But it is not these who have 
been most widely read. Twenty years ago, when all 
the world was reading Longfellow or Tennyson, 
Howells or Charles Reade, an author was writing in 
Brooklyn, of whom the upper world knew absolutely 
nothing. Under a pseudonym (which shall be name- 
less here) he numbered readers by many, many thou- 
sands. His stories went into scores of homes where 
Howells' have gone into one, and great was his reward. 

These conditions have not been peculiar to 
America. They are true also in England, where 
in cheap weekly papers, or in cheap paper-bound 
volumes, authors unknown to Mayfair and Belgravia, 
to stately country homes and to seashore resorts, 
have found readers by hundreds of thousands. 
There was the author of " Gideon Giles," which in 
its day had more readers than " Vanity Fair " or 
" Henry Esmond," " David Copperfield " or " Our 
Mutual Friend," and which at one bound sent the 
circulation of the paper in which it appeared from 
100,000 copies per week to 500,000. Its author's 
name is now overwhelmed in forgetfulness. There, 
too, was the creator of "Jack Harkaway," whose 
stories were universally popular in their time, but 
are now unknown and I believe unprinted. 

In France the same has been true. Emile Riche- 
bourg was probably the most successful of them all 
— these widely known and widely unknown writers. 



40 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Richebourg wrote stories for a Paris newspaper that 
had the largest circulation of all French papers. His 
readers were of the lower classes, and what we call 
tout Paris knew him not. He wrote tales of adven- 
ture, mystery, pathos, and virtue in humble walks of 
life. Poverty and merit at his hands always found 
their appropriate reward. His newspaper once sub- 
stituted for him a new author, whose fame had liter- 
ally gone to the ends of the earth, — Jules Verne. 
It printed " Michael Strogoff," and the result was a 
loss of 80,000 readers in one week. Back then came 
Richebourg in triumph, and back in his train came 
the lost readers. 

Robert Burns might die in ignoble poverty and Poe 
in direst want. Wordsworth might live all his days 
in a humble cottage and Carlyle seek in vain for a 
publisher. But as narrators of highly sensational 
tales, such as our Brooklyn writer, the two English- 
men, and the Frenchman narrated, the world willingly 
has paid with munificent alacrity. Time, however, 
has brought sweet revenges. The elect of this world 
of literature eventually get their reward, and an 
exceeding great reward it is. They, as great un- 
known, become in due time world-famous men, 
having written not for a day, or for a generation, 
but for all time, and who are of 

those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence. 

The foregoing remarks are true when applied to 
the most widely circulated magazines. Those maga- 



THE GREAT UNKNOWN 41 

zines which are most famous, whose names are 
familiar to every one, are not the magazines most 
widely circulated. Statistics on the subject may 
appall us. We have commonly thought of a cer- 
tain monthly publication in Philadelphia as the 
only one which far outstripped the older monthlies, 
but it is only one among several. And the strang- 
est fact about the statistics is that the magazines in 
question are unknown to thousands of readers to 
whom the older monthlies have been household 
works. In Washington, for example, has been 
published a monthly periodical devoted to house- 
hold matters, that has been credited with a cir- 
culation of 150,000 copies. In Boston there has 
been one with 116,000; in Springfield, Ohio, one 
with 260,000, and in New York one with 380,000. 
Not one of these publications would be recognized 
at the Authors' Club as familiar to its members. 
Nor are they familiar to the desks of literary 
editors in New York or talked about in newspapers. 
The world of literature, properly so called, moves 
on, unheeding them, caring for them not. 

For readers of these periodicals and for readers of 
Richebourg and the others named, how many books 
stamped with the final approval of the world's best 
regard, for several generations have remained wholly 
unknown — books, for example, like Montaigne's and 
Burton's, of which the finest minds never get weary. 
Montaigne and the letters of Howell, said Thack- 
eray, "are my bedside books." These authors "talk 



42 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

about themselves," he added, "and don't weary 
me." He loved to read them when awakened from 
his night sleep. Dr. Holmes was especially fond 
of Burton, and had read him, as one of the " means 
for insuring peaceful slumber at the right time and 
enough of it." He was his " mental night-cap," and 
he had read him for a quarter or half hour before 
going to bed. He thus consumed a year or more in 
going through the folio edition of 1676. 

What impressed him particularly in Burton was 
the frequency with which he found his own thoughts 
and sayings anticipated. It was probably this quality 
in Burton — his immense humanity, his power of feel- 
ing and expressing sentiments common to good or 
strong minds — that made Dr. Johnson say he was 
the only author with whom he was acquainted who 
could get him out of bed several hours before he 
wished to rise. When Emerson had read Montaigne 
it seemed to him that he had himself written the book 
in some former life, so correctly did it voice his thought 
and experience. Perhaps Dr. Holmes should not have 
been surprised to find Burton speaking so forcibly to 
his own thoughts and experience. There are always 
between the true humorists points of strong alliance. 
Sterne appreciated Burton with all the heartiness of 
Dr. Johnson or Byron or Dr. Holmes. But Sterne 
stole from him. This was because Burton, in a way, 
voiced his thought and experience. He may well 
have felt as if he had himself written the book in 
some former life. 



YELLOW JOURNALISM IN LITERATURE 

It is not many years since reports of book sales 
from the chief centres of the United States named 
" Quo Vadis " as leading all other books. Reports 
from some thirty centres all made substantially the 
same showing. In twenty-one of them "Quo Vadis " 
was first, and in the others second or third. But 
where is " Quo Vadis " now ? 

This story has been called a pot-boiler. Admirers 
of its author said from the start that it was inferior 
to Sienkiewicz's earlier writings, — inferior as litera- 
ture, and as a contribution to historical knowledge. 
" Quo Vadis " was not a story to be read aloud in 
mixed company. What ought to have been the first 
test of it, thus became the final one. It tells no 
wholesome tale. Humanity there seen is humanity 
in its degradation. 

From one end of the land to another for many 
years has come a long and pathetic cry against the 
methods of what we call "yellow journalism." But 
here we had a book describing scenes, giving con- 
versations, and painting manners, such as no news- 
paper in all this land would present in the same 
colours, the same language, the same vivid portraiture. 

43 



44 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

No tale ever told of the most immoral life found in 
a great city ever yet has equalled in literalness, in 
precision, in actual nakedness, some of the occur- 
rences Sienkiewicz described. The book went into 
more than 200,000 homes. But there were no 
pulpit orators to condemn it as they condemn news- 
papers. Should more be required of newspapers 
than of books? May book publishers commit greater 
sins against public morality than newspaper pub- 
lishers ? It is impossible to see why an age de- 
nouncing stories of immoral life when printed in 
newspapers should tolerate them when printed in 
books. 

The marvel indeed grows that the public will 
read and applaud in a bound book the same sort 
of license that it condemns in a newspaper. Un- 
questionably a bad book can do more harm than a 
bad newspaper. Its influence is more silent and 
insidious ; the reader is more alone ; the poison 
makes its way with far less resistance. 

Because the story Sienkiewicz gave in " Quo 
Vadis " had a historical basis, because authorities on 
the period commended it as in the main accurate, the 
book escaped general censure. Its truthfulness to 
fact was accepted as sufficient reason for tolerating 
the hideousness of the picture painted. The worst 
articles that get into the newspapers are also truth- 
ful as to fact, — truthful to the point of repulsiveness. 
Stories of debauchery and crime are narrated with 
the most careful fidelity to actual occurrences, and 



YELLOW JOURNALISM IN LITERATURE 45 

are the worse for the public in exact measure as they 
are most accurate. 

Sienkiewicz is not our sole offender ; nor is he our 
greatest. Moreover, he is not the only writer who has 
chosen Rome for the scene of the frightful depravity 
he depicts. But Sienkiewicz dealt with the Rome of 
Nero. Another offender deals with the Rome of our 
own day. The Italian writer named D'Annunzio has 
risen high in the literary firmament in late years. 
His topics are ever the same, — human crime and 
wretchedness, desolate homes and divided families, 
as the outcome of ignoble passion. We may fancy 
in middle life that we have heard of, or have ob- 
served, about all that the world contains of depravity 
and self-imposed misery, but in the pages of D'An- 
nunzio are sounded depths such as few that aim to 
lead sane lives have dreamed of. 

Had D'Annunzio any laudable purpose to serve, 
his books might find a reason for existence. He holds 
up frightful examples, but he does not hold them 
up as an active moralist. Here lies his error, and 
here the offence he commits. After reading him, 
common objects in life assume unfamiliar charm and 
beauty ; the green fields and the blue sky surround 
us as a benediction. One advantage derived from 
him is that when we put away his books toil is 
sweeter and oppressive care loses something of its 
weary weight. 

Need I name here certain books of later date in 
which immoral conduct forms, if not the whole mo- 



46 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

tive force, at least the chief attraction and the prime 
secret of their popularity? Two at least might be 
named ; but both were written by women, and so let 
their names pass. Among the most popular books 
of this year and a recent year have they been. No 
pulpit orator has, I believe, assailed them, nor did 
they fail to find publishers whose standing in the 
community is of the highest. 

The year that has seen these writers forge so well 
to the front produced other ephemeral books, ranking 
among the most widely read. None of them in any 
reasonable understanding of values possessed a title 
to eminence as literature. Provided we take the 
larger view and bring into the reckoning the future 
as well as the present, first rank in those years would 
have been bestowed upon the Browning letters and 
the Stevenson letters, of which not more than 
15,000 copies each have, I believe, yet been sold. 
A far smaller sale has come to another book 
that belongs to this same recent period. Perhaps 
not more than one or two thousand copies have yet 
been called for. 

I refer to the "Journals" of Audubon, the friend 
of all four-footed creatures and all birds. These 
" Journals " make in printed form two volumes, of 
about 450 pages each. They take the reader into 
almost every part of this country and into European 
lands. While reading them he dwells in the finest 
mental atmosphere, whether it be the habits of ani- 
mals Audubon writes about or meetings he has had 



YELLOW JOURNALISM IN LITERATURE 47 

with Francis Jeffrey, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Thomas 
Lawrence, and Cuvier. 

Strange had been the history of these papers. 
One of them not many years ago was found in the 
back of an old secretary ; another in a barn on 
Staten Island. Researches for material had been 
made for years by his granddaughter, Maria R. 
Audubon, in New Orleans, San Domingo, France, 
and elsewhere, resulting in the finding of material 
five times more than was printed. In these volumes 
we have not only Audubon's life, but local history 
and frontier life depicted, Daniel Boone's later times 
illustrated, the toil, the knowledge, the splendid 
spirit of one of the most inspiring men in our annals, 
unfolded in his own language. 

When " Quo Vadis " is unread, and its very title 
forgotten, these "Journals" of Audubon will still 
hold their place secure. Such is the importance of a 
real man's devoted and memorable achievements, as 
compared with a mere piece of erotic fiction. Noth- 
ing so well endures in this world as authentic records 
of worthy deeds, whether they be those of Leonidas 
or Bruno, of Jean d'Arc or Scott, of Lincoln or 
Audubon. 



VI 

COURTS OF APPEAL 

Among things that may safely be called difficult is 
giving advice in reading books — giving it wisely and 
feeling sure it will be used. This world of books 
has vast amplitude, and the needs and tastes of 
readers are widely varied. So many things must be 
known before definite advice can be undertaken ; 
and these things are sometimes impossible to know. 
One may deal in general propositions, and then feel 
entirely safe ; but general propositions will not sat- 
isfy readers. They are apt to leave them as much 
in the dark as they were before. Indeed, what one 
says may contain nothing that the reader does not 
feel he already knew. He will then go away a sad- 
der but not a wiser man. 

Carry le and Frederic Harrison are notable among 
writers who have undertaken something in these di- 
rections. Probably their influence has been potent 
in directing the minds of readers away from ephem- 
eral books and centring them for a time on the 
books that last through generations of men; more 
than that they did not do. Few who have descended 
from general truths to particular instances can be 
said to have been well rewarded. Readers who have 

48 



COURTS OF APPEAL 49 

been directed, we will say, to Milton, Scott, Gibbon, 
Wordsworth, and Byron, would perhaps report that 
two or three of these writers charmed their emotional 
natures or inspired their understanding, but the 
others brought them no message of consolation, no 
argosy of knowledge. It is even worse where advice 
pertains to books of lesser rank, and worst of all 
when it pertains to current literature. It is a wise 
man indeed who can be certain of his ground when 
he steps into those boggy meadows, or tries to find a 
way about in those tangled thickets. 

The most serious aspect of the task presents itself 
to the professional reviewer of the day's literature. 
Fortunately for Carlyle and Mr. Harrison they were 
able to escape responsibility for dealing with books 
the world had not yet tried. It is the fate of 
reviewers that they can take no refuge in the great 
writers of past ages. They cannot deal with princi- 
ples and verdicts fixed and eternal, but must at once 
confront a proposition lying right before them — Is 
this new book worth reading? Sometimes they go 
right ; quite often they go wrong ; for it is in the long 
run, not the critic, however gifted, who determines 
what shall be the fate of any book, but that wise and 
great public, which in all times has reserved to itself 
the inalienable right to determine it. 

It is probably the fault of most reviewers that they 
fail to look beyond their own taste, — fail, that is, so 
to project themselves into the common intelligence as 
to know what the popular judgment will be. But 



50 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

there can never exist a guide for readers that shall 
approach anywhere near infallibility. The history of 
criticism will show that its greatest services have 
been, not in severe and searching examination of 
books, but in making the public know what books 
worth its attention had newly come into existence. 
Actual guides critics were not, and will not be. Let 
us call them rather heralds, their duties ceasing when 
the procession starts. 

Learned literary criticism of an eminence strictly 
authoritative has almost ceased to exist. In the past 
there were giants, the Whipples, the Lowells, the 
Ripleys, to mention only our own. But can it be 
maintained that the public has met with irreparable 
losses ? Literary history contains few things more 
interesting than the ways in which criticism has gone 
astray — the failures to recognize genius when it 
appeared, the unfavourable verdicts passed upon work 
destined to favourable acceptance from the public. 
These examples help to illustrate forcibly the uncer- 
tain value, the chronic fallibility, of all criticism as a 
court of appeal. 

One very distinguished reviewer failed to discover 
greatness in " The Scarlet Letter." Perhaps as many 
as twenty missed the genius disclosed in " Sartor 
Resartus." How fine is the example Hawthorne's 
writings afford of the failure of critics, good or bad, 
to make or unmake them. Praise itself could not 
create popularity for those works in Hawthorne's 
day. It has been through the slow process of time, 



COURTS OF APPEAL 5 1 

the certain verdict of the English-speaking race itself, 
that this inspired genius has been placed on the 
pedestal from which none can dislodge him. 

It has come within the experience of most book- 
sellers and publishers to observe books of high merit 
which have made their way, regardless of praise or 
blame, in any public place, — books which have tri- 
umphantly passed the ordeal of criticism, whether of 
sweeping condemnation or of perfunctory praise. 
They made their way in spite of all that was said or 
not said ; praise denied or praise bestowed ; and in 
spite of notoriety conferred by newspapers. Often 
these were books by authors never heard of before. 
Perhaps they had been published anonymously and 
were books with which the publishers began with 
little faith. One shining example we have in a book 
now historic in many ways that was long hawked 
about London in vain for a publisher, one over 
which the publisher who finally took it, on noting its 
cold reception from the public, uttered many a groan ; 
but a work now famous as are few books of recent 
times, — Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus." 

Again, to take a book of our own day and one of 
the most widely read, — Mr. Ford's " The Honourable 
Peter Stirling." Its success illustrates how to a 
work of some distinct merit recognition will come 
eventually, whatever may have been its early fate. 
Mr. Ford's success certainly was not made by the 
critics. They had all reviewed his book and in the 
main favourably ; but it made no special headway 



52 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

until long afterward, when a demand started up in 
San Francisco, spreading thence through the Middle 
West, and now it still spreads. Here we see how 
there had grown up an army of book readers, remote 
from great centres of life and trade, and independent 
of critics and newspaper notoriety in determining the 
fate of a book. 

After all that may be said, criticism remains a 
matter largely of individual opinion. That opinion 
may not necessarily be founded in prejudice, neither 
for nor against the work in hand ; but it very com- 
monly results from an individual notion of what 
literature is or ought to be. Even with the highest 
order of minds, we often see what this means 
when we find well-endowed men who acknowledge 
an indifference to writers on whom time has set its 
fixed seal. This was curiously illustrated many years 
ago, when Oliver Wendell Holmes undertook to write 
a life of Emerson. Dr. Holmes was probably the 
least fitted of his contemporaries to write about 
Emerson. His intellectual obtuseness with respect 
to Emerson produced painful results. 

The truth is, and it should be oftener acknow- 
ledged, that there exists no recognized court of 
opinion — certainly no court of final appeal, in so far 
as any chosen body of cultured men may constitute 
one. One court alone exists in the world, — the 
tribunal of time. Criticism may go right or may go 
wrong ; a whole generation may neglect or condemn 
a book; the book, in fact, may become scarce and 



COURTS OF APPEAL 53 

almost forgotten ; but if it have within its covers the 
seeds of immortal life, Time will save it, and a tri- 
bunal greater than critics will fix its place and forever 
hold it there. That tribunal is the central heart of 
cultured mankind. 

Criticism in itself is not a high form of literature, 
and it is proper that it should not be. When it shines 
at all, it shines as by a borrowed light. It must al- 
ways be an ephemeral thing. Some of the strongest, 
most virile criticism ever produced was that of 
Hazlitt ; but how few read Hazlitt now ! In our 
own century Lowell reached the highest altitudes, 
but I cannot believe that his critical writings will be 
often read far down this century. Lowell's letters 
will outlive them all, — those charming personal com- 
positions, in which he put so much of learning, so 
much of wit and insight, so much even of life itself. 
In them we see a man deeply learned and widely 
cultured, but with all that a real, living, working man, 
now at his tasks, now at his play. 

Criticism possesses stronger intellectual interest for 
cultivated minds than any other form of writing, except 
the actually creative. But this interest springs from 
the few, not the many. For the many critical writ- 
ings are almost unread books. In the period when 
they flourished best, it was the few who read them 
and for whom they were produced. Times have 
changed. The number of readers has enormously 
increased since Hazlitt' s days ; it has been aug- 
mented very notably since Lowell wrote. With 



54 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

this has come a corresponding increase in the num- 
ber of books published, — so great a multiplication 
that we now have this flood where formerly there was 
only a gently flowing stream. But for critical writ- 
ings there has scarcely been an increase commensu- 
rate with the general increase in books. 

In the increase in the number of readers who are 
well educated and in the number of books published 
are found conditions which have materially altered 
the occupation of the book reviewer. Formerly he 
addressed himself to a small, select class who needed 
not so much to be led into habits of wise and profit- 
able reading as to be entertained with criticism more 
sharp and learned than their own. In our day we 
find a vast multitude of new readers, eager for know- 
ledge and impatient to acquire it; their minds as 
practical as the age in which they live, their under- 
standings virile and competent ; who seek not so 
much for scholarly criticism as for information as to 
what books exist in current literature that can have 
any interest and value for them. An absorbing self- 
confidence is theirs. They would read the books for 
themselves, and form their own conclusions, mean- 
while bestowing a gracious " thank you " on the 
critic, who, in the old way, would form conclusions 
for them. 

In these circumstances shall the critics yield up 
their office, try to dam the flood, or seek for some 
means by which to guide the public in its perilous 
journey down the flood ? Here we have some vast 



COURTS OF APPEAL 55 

literary Mississippi that is forever spreading out 
beyond its true borders, overflowing fertile lands, and 
submerging homes and those who dwell in them. 
Where lies the course of wisdom for the literary 
periodicals and for those who conduct them ? Shall 
they beat the air with protests sure to be made in 
vain ? Shall they cry aloud at the flood and spread 
still wider the public alarm, bringing fright, conster- 
nation, and perhaps drowning to the helpless multi- 
tude along shore or in the rushing stream ? Or shall 
they aim, with such thoughtful care and calm fore- 
sight as God gives them, to build a craft that is sea- 
worthy, and pilot down the channel all who will come 
on board ? 

While the flood rises and pours along its way, 
does it remain worth while to select the bad and 
condemn them, when to condemn is so often 
merely to attract attention to them and enlarge the 
number of their readers ? Is there not a better 
course to be found in choosing such as are good, 
and directing the public mind toward them ? For 
books essentially bad can better condemnation be 
found than eloquent silence ? any condemnation 
that will be more effective ? any that will keep the 
bad in that obscurity in which it is best that they 
remain ? 

In this view the course of those who direct criti- 
cism will be to choose the books that have real 
value and some actual utility in the life of man to- 
day. To these, chosen from the great mass, and 



56 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



making perhaps ten per cent of the whole output, 
they can give attention. Let their motive be to 
inform readers with clearness and good judgment 
as to the contents of those books. In the main 
all this will mean that the reviews will not be un- 
favourable. Dealing, as the articles will, with books 
having at least some temporary value, there will be 
in most cases commendation. 

Under this system readers will have their atten- 
tion called to books that have any claims to notice, 
and with readers will rest the final verdict, the 
ultimate judgment, which may well be depended 
upon as time passes to determine which books are 
destined for a day and which for a longer time. 
As said, it is always in the central heart of man- 
kind that books have found that court of judges 
who will make or unmake their fame and fortune. 
In time the enduring verdict will come. That ver- 
dict, moreover, will be just and unimpeachable, 
beyond the power of critics, however gifted, to 
impair or reverse. 



VII 

IMPOSSIBLE ACADEMIES 

A curious literary interest is the interest which 
men and women periodically take in proposals to 
establish in England or America an Academy 
modelled after the one of France. About once in 
ten years some one revives such a project, and 
promptly gets up a list of members. The step 
seems a natural outcome of the state of literature 
— the tremendous output and the rising fortunes 
of authors. The most recent offender is the Lon- 
don literary paper which itself bears the name of 
Academy -, and from which wiser literary enterprises 
have usually proceeded. 

As in most other cases of the kind, the Academy 
undertook to supply a list of proper members for 
this possible collection of Forty Immortals. Ten 
years before, when another London paper did the 
same thing, there was a difference in the methods 
by which the list was obtained. The Academy's 
list was prepared by a vote of the staff of the 
paper; the one ten years before, by a vote of 
readers, the paper being the Pall Mall Gazette. 
What is particularly interesting in the two lists is 
the extent to which names were common in both. 

57 



58 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

There are nineteen names that appeared in both, 
as follows : — 

i. John Ruskin. n. R. D. Blackmore. 

2. W. E. Gladstone. 12. W. W. Skeat. 

3. Herbert Spencer. 13. W. E. H. Lecky. 

4. Duke of Argyll. 14. S. R. Gardiner. 

5. A. C. Swinburne. 15. Bishop Stubbs. 

6. J. H. McCarthy. 16. Andrew Lang. 

7. John Morley. 17. Edmund Gosse. 

8. Sir G. O. Trevelyan. 18. Austin Dobson. 

9. Leslie Stephen. 19. W. S. Gilbert. 
10. George Macdonald. 

Fault could not readily have been found with 
this list. Many names were conspicuously fit, and 
none could be called conspicuously unfit. Were an 
Academy actually to be established here or in Eng- 
land, and were it certain that names as worthy as 
these would always secure the necessary votes, an 
Academy might be tolerated, inimical though our 
institutions are to such projects. But the certainty 
is that no such wise selection could be depended 
on. Even more than in France would gross inequali- 
ties exist in the merits of members ; even more than 
in France would modest worth suffer at the hands of 
immodest mediocrity. An institution conceived for 
the purpose of doing honour to genius would all too 
often become the medium of honours to mere talent, 
commonplace and aggressive. 

But apart from this danger is the circumstance 
that no place exists in our society for such an in- 
stitution. The world of literature itself is the 






IMPOSSIBLE ACADEMIES 59 

purest possible democracy ; the able and the strong 
are sure of their reward in that land of equal 
opportunities, just as the feeble and the preten- 
tious are certain to get no more than to them 
belongs. Circumstances favoured, and in some 
degree forced, an Academy upon the free domain 
of letters in France. Founded in monarchical 
times by a strong man, to whom liberty was an 
impossible conception, literature itself had little to 
do with its coming into existence. Here or in 
England to-day the case would be changed. Lit- 
erature and those who follow literature would be 
responsible for the step. 

And responsible for what ? For the founding of 
an institution in which caste had been set up in the 
domain of letters, in which men without requisite 
merit, possessed of "pulls," would acquire rank 
above those who had all the merit needed, but not 
the " pulls." 

Doubtless it will not be long before the scheme is 
revived again. These matters run in cycles, and a 
new list is quite due. It has been idle heretofore to 
urge that in France the Academy survives because 
it has become historic and venerated, and of which 
the destruction now would be an act of desecration, 
quite as fit to horrify the public as the demolition of 
the Louvre or Versailles. Wise men, even in France, 
understand how slight is the value which member- 
ship in it has as testimony to literary rank. They 
will never forget those immortals in French literature 



60 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

(immortals in history, if not Immortals in their own 
day) who never were admitted to membership in the 
Academy ; nor can they forget in what utter failure 
of contemporary recognition the greatest books have 
often been written — Dante's, Milton's, Shakespeare's. 
Shakespeare's ? What a story lies here to tell ! 
Not many years ago an English gentleman, Mr. 
Charles Clement Walker, erected, at his own ex- 
pense, in the yard of the parish church of St. Mary 
the Virgin, in that part of London known distinc- 
tively as "the city," a monument to John Heminge 
and Henry Condell, and on its face recorded the 
debt that Shakespeare and the world at large owe 
them forever. Carlyle, addressing an English audi- 
ence, once referred to Shakespeare as " the grandest 
thing we have yet done." He questioned whether 
there existed any million of Englishmen whom Eng- 
land might not with greater wisdom give up rather 
than the Stratford peasant ; and then, as if to apply 
the supreme test, inquired whether, instead of Shake- 
speare, England might not better surrender her Ind- 
ian Empire. The men to whom England owes 
possession of India — Clive, Hastings, and all the 
others — long since had acquired fame among the 
makers of England's territorial empire. But 
the memories of the men to whom we owe the 
preservation of Shakespeare's writings — the men 
who secured that priceless acquisition for England's 
intellectual empire — for almost three centuries re- 
mained unhonoured and well-nigh forgotten. 



IMPOSSIBLE ACADEMIES 6 1 

Except for the pious and loving conduct of Hem- 
inge and Condell — fellow-actors with Shakespeare 
and his surviving partners in the Globe Theatre — 
the world must have failed to secure the first folio 
edition of the poet's works. To contemplate what 
a loss that would have been is appalling. It means 
that great numbers of the plays would have remained 
unpublished, and probably would have perished alto- 
gether. Shakespeare made no mention of his plays 
in his will, and never had a thought of their publica- 
tion, for in his time it was not the custom to publish 
plays. When Ben Jonson went contrary to custom 
and issued some of his own plays, he was ridiculed 
for calling them his "workes." Indeed, Heminge 
and Condell, in bringing out the first folio, felt under 
the necessity of apologizing for their conduct. With 
all the sweetness and affection that animates their 
preface — " We have done an office to the dead, 
. . . without ambition either of self-profit or fame ; 
only to keep the memory of so worthy a Friend and 
fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare" — there is a 
kind of pathos to start tears. 

Profit from sales of the folio, there could have been 
none, either for editors or printers, since nine years 
passed ere a second folio was undertaken. Only a 
pound was charged for the book, — a pound for a 
volume now worth, when in fairly good condition, 
the price of an excellent farm, or from six to eight 
thousand dollars. Heminge and Condell, moreover, 
parted with what was valuable property to them, for 



62 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



in publishing the plays they made it possible for 
rival theatres to use them. 

They surely gave one of the highest evidences of 
friendship, a friendship beautiful with unquestionable 
love. But theirs was more than friendship. It was 
the ability to recognize a great man once they were 
in his presence, — an ability which few contempora- 
ries shared with them, and which it is certain that 
an Academy would not have shared. Ben Jonson 
knew how near he had lived to greatness, or what 
he called "the wonder of our age." Heminge and 
Condell knew it ; but how small would be the com- 
plete list of those who were equally wise in their 
day and generation. 



VIII 

MODERN EDITING 

Coincident with an increase in books has been 
the development of the art of editing old books. 
From this source comes the large volume of reprints 
— a volume that increases and in which is to be 
found the chief consolation in the enormous output. 
Shakespeare, in the eighteenth century, found sev- 
eral editors and sorely needed them; scores have 
descended upon him since, and to this need in 
Shakespeare's case we must probably date the later 
rise of the art to a distinct place among literary 
accomplishments. How widespread its practice 
now is need not be specified ; every man of letters 
may be assumed to have had some hand at it; 
but the services it has rendered to literature are 
seldom well understood and have been infrequently 
recognized. 

Its best influence has probably been seen in the 
improvement in the methods which authors them- 
selves employ to make their books more accessible, 
by means of suggestive and useful tables of contents, 
intelligent page captions, and proper indexes. Here 
the changes wrought in recent decades have been strik- 
ing. Looking back over a period of not more than 

63 



64 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

thirty years, one may recall notable examples of actual 
genius in this sort of work, — examples that must still 
be exerting potent influences upon men whose busi- 
ness it is to put books together. 

First among them should stand George Birkbeck 
Hill, the editor of Boswell. Dr. Hill has been an 
enthusiast regarding Johnson. Perhaps this is not 
remarkable, since there had been Johnson enthusiasts 
before him. Enthusiasts over Johnson as a writer, 
however, were mainly of a former generation. It is 
now the fashion to neglect and discredit him, and in 
no large sense of the word is Johnson any longer an 
author read. For one who reads his poems, possesses 
or ever saw his dictionary, for one familiar with his 
prose writings, there are ten who know their Boswell 
and perhaps as many who read Pope. 

Johnson the man potently survives; not Johnson 
the author. Dr. Hill's courage therefore deserves 
exceptional credit. Nothing within the range of 
modern editorial industry has exceeded the industry 
bestowed by him on Johnson. If his labours go 
inadequately rewarded, and even if they go unap- 
preciated by such as would reward them if they 
only could, the fault will be the fault of others 
than himself. He has worked for Johnson nobly 
and with singleness of heart worthy of Johnson 
himself. Doubtless he is quite indifferent to re- 
wards, except the rewards which, with their exceed- 
ing greatness, literature herself bestows. 

Dr. Hill has given us an edition of Boswell that 



MODERN EDITING 6$ 

supersedes all others; it is rich beyond the dreams 
of avarice in new information, and as monumental, 
loving, and exhaustive a work as was ever performed 
for any book in our language. He has laid us under 
further obligations by producing a final edition of 
"Rasselas," and by preparing a compilation of the 
wit and wisdom of Johnson, which forms an extremely 
readable collection of observations, good alike to read 
of a morning before the day's duties are faced, and 
of an evening ere sleep subdues and restores the fac- 
ulties ; for of all writers Johnson is the most bracing. 

Until a few years ago the writings of Washing- 
ton were as much in need of a new editor as ever 
Shakespeare's were. Original manuscripts had been 
tampered with seriously, and there had come to light 
a vast store of new and significant material. Our 
demands of editors and publishers had much altered 
since the times of Jared Sparks. Textual integrity 
and the whole story have been exacted with relent- 
less precision. Discretion in an editor has ceased to 
have the meaning it had formerly, scrupulous devo- 
tion to the text has so greatly modified the nature 
and extent of his function. 

The custom of abusing Sparks when opportunity 
offers fails to take sufficient account of this change. 
He lived in times different from ours. Not only was 
he hampered by the limited mass of material then 
accessible ; the needs and requirements of the public 
imposed limitations upon him. These were of the 
simplest kind. Irving's commendation of Sparks 

F 



66 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

illustrates this. For the most part the work of 
Sparks was pioneer work in the truest sense. We 
can only appreciate the extent and value of it all 
when we consider the state our history would be in if 
he had failed to do the work which we are now wont 
to abuse him for not doing better. 

It was a pleasure to see that Mr. Worthington C. 
Ford appreciated the office Sparks really filled and 
adorned. He made due acknowledgment of his 
indebtedness to him, and recognized the obstacles 
that lay in Sparks's path. Mr. Ford's own plan 
differed radically from that of Sparks. He chose to 
print the writings as they were written. His edition, 
like the portrait Cromwell wanted, gives the writings 
in their exact form, "warts and all." Many de- 
partures from correct orthography are therefore to 
be found ; many curious structures in the way of 
sentences, and much original punctuation. 

Viewed from the standpoints of scholarship and 
research to-day, positive gains have resulted from 
this method. What is most important, is that we can 
now see Washington more as he was. There can be 
no doubt that Sparks's way deprived the writings of 
a large part of their human interest. The half- 
legendary hero that Washington had become to his 
countrymen is probably to be attributed in no small 
measure to Sparks. He never desired us to see that 
Washington possessed the frailties of his species. 
As Mr. Ford pointed out, the young colonel doing 
hard work and fruitless service against the Indians 



MODERN EDITING 67 

and French was made to write like an experienced 
man in the closing decade of the eighteenth century. 
He appears never to have had a youth. 

All this Mr. Ford has changed. Besides Washing- 
ton as patriot, soldier, and statesman, he helps us to 
see him as a man. We are able to know him better, 
and our love, we may be sure, has not of necessity 
undergone change. Natural intuition teaches us all 
that every man possesses in his composition a good 
deal of human nature. Paragons of virtue and 
talent adorn works of fiction very acceptably some- 
times, but in sober actual life their pretensions may 
be safely received with incredulity. For these rea- 
sons alone, apart from others more to the taste of 
scholars, the appearance of Mr. Ford's fourteen 
octavos was watched with continuous and undimin- 
ished interest. Except for his work, it is unlikely 
that his brother, Paul Leicester Ford, could ever 
have written his important and much read book, 
"The True George Washington." 

Mr. Ford, in his volume on "The True George 
Washington," developed an interesting phase of that 
modern investigation into the characters of eminent 
men from which we learn how the human side 
of them was not, after all, essentially different 
from the human side of scores of their contempo- 
raries. They were neither better nor worse than 
many respected men who reached no eminence at 
all. Mr. Ford aimed not at the feat called white- 
washing, but rather the reverse. He presented 



Washington not as a personification of virtues, but as 
a human being with many human limitations. 

Meanwhile certain men whom the world has gen- 
erally condemned have been presented to us as not 
so bad as they have been represented ; apart from 
their relations to public affairs, we are assured that 
they possessed estimable traits. Professor H. Morse 
Stephens, reviewing the work of a French writer, 
has presented Marat in a favourable light. Marat's 
medical degree was from Edinburgh ; his taste in 
science and literature was elevated ; his love of the 
people sincere, his opposition to aristocrats dictated 
by real public spirit. More recently Philip II. has 
been held up as a "good husband, a tender father, 
an affectionate brother, and a patient, kindly mas- 
ter," whereas Froude represented Philip's English 
wife as having a " parched heart thirsting for 
affection," and as " flinging herself on a breast to 
which an iceberg was warm, upon a man to whom 
love was an unmeaning word, except as the most 
brutal of passions." The champion of Philip was 
Major Martin Hume, who cited the letters of cour- 
tiers, ambassadors, and others, who describe him as 
a devoted and attentive husband to Mary, and as a 
husband whose three wives all adored him, the last 
one, a girl not half his age, writing to her own 
mother in the most satisfied terms possible. Major 
Hume presented clear proof that to his own children 
Philip was an attentive and charming parent, per- 
sonally interested in their amusements and in the 



MODERN EDITING 69 

clothes they wore. All of which shows that a man 
may have one public character and another private 
one; that he may hunt heresy with the sword and 
send an armada to destroy England, and yet have a 
gentle, affectionate nature at his own fireside. 

Mr. Ford's volume has corrected what remained of 
the false impressions created by Sparks, who sought 
to present a flawless hero. Thanks to Mr. Ford we 
have an explanation of the origin of Washington's 
eccentric spelling, know that he never ceased to ad- 
mire fine women, that he could make a joke, and that 
to carry an election he did not scruple to provide 
strong drink for his constituents. Carlyle should 
have lived to read Mr. Ford's book. He might then 
have revised his estimate and abandoned that sug- 
gestive way he had of alluding to Washington patron- 
izingly as " George." 

Services scarcely less notable have been rendered 
to one of the greatest of English poets, in the edition 
of Byron's works, published under the sanction and 
with the assistance of Byron's grandson, the Earl of 
Lovelace, son of Ada, "sole daughter of my house 
and heart." The new letters prove highly impor- 
tant. In the first volume are 168, nearly all of them 
written by Byron, and nearly one-half new, while the 
four volumes comprise 1198 letters, of which only 561 
were printed by Moore. One of the most curious is 
from Byron's father, and was written in France when 
he had taken refuge there from his creditors. Of his 
wife Captain Byron said, " She is very amiable at a 



JO OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

distance, but I defy you and all the apostles to live 
with her two months ; " and of his son, " I am happy 
to hear that he is well, but for his walking, it is im- 
possible, as he is club-footed." 

Probably our modern admiration for the man who 
turns phrases cleverly has led us away from a 
writer never careful about such matters. Byron was 
another name for energy and fire. He was nothing 
if not life and power. Never lived another English 
poet who wrote such " thoughts that breathe," such 
" words that burn." His day will come again when 
heroes stalk abroad. Had America found in Spain a 
foeman worthy of her steel, it might come now ; but 
who could look for heroes in a war where on the one 
side was a people talking like Don Quixote, while its 
admirals ran into landlocked harbours to await an 
enemy that could crush its fleet as one might crush 
an eggshell in the hand ? Wars when Byron wrote 
were between titans, and the verse of Byron was in- 
spired by an energy titanic. In piping times of 
peace we cannot hope to see him restored to pri- 
macy, nor in times of war if only a great power has 
the easy task of crushing a feeble, fallen state. 

Byron belonged to a romantic age, an age of ex- 
pansion, of new freedom and hopes for the human 
race. If he did not voice this as acceptably as Cole- 
ridge and Wordsworth did in some of their earlier 
verse, he was a splendid embodiment of that new- 
spirit of personal independence, that assertion of 
individuality, which followed in its train. We may 



MODERN EDITING 7 1 

say that Byron wrote too rapidly to write always 
well, that he often showed not what liberty could do, 
but how license could run ; but there remained in 
him the true masterful energy of a great spirit, the 
passion of a strong and indomitable soul, a breadth 
and grandeur to which poetic genius seldom has 
risen in the literature of any tongue. 

Next should be mentioned the services Edmund 
Gosse rendered to Gray. Perhaps the most remark- 
able thing about his edition of Gray is the fact that 
it, or the like of it, should have waited so long to 
make its appearance ; it is the only complete edition 
that has ever been issued. Gray died in 1771, and 
his fame, as the author of what is perhaps the most 
widely known short poem in our language, had long 
ago spread into every nook and corner of the Eng- 
lish-speaking world. Meanwhile books by foreign 
authors had had translation after translation, and 
edition after edition of them had been prepared. The 
lives of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and many other 
poets had, at the same time, been exhaustively writ- 
ten and rewritten from all points of view, and their 
works in complete editions had been printed scores 
of times. But with Gray no one, until Mr. Gosse, 
thought it worth while to take up. either the task of 
relating his life adequately or the task of publishing 
his works in a form that, with proper regard for 
truth and exactness, could be called complete. When 
the memoir was published, any one who read it with 
knowledge of the subject saw clearly enough how 



72 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

admirably the career of Gray had been treated ; they 
saw, moreover, what a void in literary history had 
suddenly been filled. 

For many years belief had existed that a mass of 
unpublished works by Gray still awaited the industry 
of the explorer, and this fact, combined with Mr. 
Gosse's accomplishments and the shocking condi- 
tions in which the published works had always been 
presented, pointed to Mr. Gosse as the man who 
ought to undertake the task of rehabilitating — or 
perhaps it would be more accurate and just to say 
the task of habilitating — the author of the " Elegy 
Written in a Country Churchyard." The result was 
Mr. Gosse's edition of Gray, the only one worth a 
man's time and money to purchase. 

In the first place, it is the only one in which the 
poetical and prose works are printed together. In 
the second, it is the only one which contains all the 
prose works that had heretofore been printed, to say 
nothing of prose writings which were known to exist 
but which had not been published. In the third, it 
is the only one that supplies all the known works 
in verse, and gives, what we believe no former single 
edition ever gave, all the variations of the " Elegy," 
all the suppressed stanzas, and all three of the extant 
versions. This, indeed, ought to be a sufficiently 
formidable catalogue of virtues. Were it necessary 
to descend to minor points on which editors have 
often justified a new edition of an author's works, 
it would be easy to prolong the list. It is proper, 



MODERN EDITING 73 

then, to say that Mr. Gosse laid the literary world 
under heavy debt to him, and we need have no sort 
of doubt that for the painstaking and singularly 
laborious nature of his achievement he has had his 
reward in the substantial and impressive fact that his 
name henceforth will be associated long with Gray's. 

Former editors aided Mr. Gosse only in slight 
ways. There were only two who might have aided 
him, the first being Mason and the second Mitford. 
The former was an inordinately vain man, and 
amazingly deficient in literary conscience, while the 
latter, though in most ways superior to his predeces- 
sor, had the misfortune to live in what Mr. Gosse 
calls " the dark ages of bibliography." 

Mr. Gosse's edition contains only a limited amount 
of new matter — far less, he frankly owns, than he 
had hoped to make it. He slowly became convinced 
that no such treasures as had been hinted at exist. 
Again and again he had been on the brink of dis- 
covery, and " each time the prose has proved a cloud, 
the poems a mirage." But, for all this, the edition 
is of the highest importance to students of English 
literature. Gray's works no longer suffer, on the 
one hand, from editorial chaos, or on the other, from 
editorial incapacity and high-handedness. 

Mr. Alfred Ainger has done as great service to 
the writings of Charles Lamb. Indeed, he is almost 
an ideal editor. With another author, and an author 
belonging to some more distant age, he might have 
succeeded less completely, but with Lamb he wholly 



74 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

succeeded. He was amply equipped for his under- 
taking. He had long been a clergyman attached in 
some greater or less capacity to the Temple Church. 
Sympathy with Lamb's sentiment was therefore easy, 
and knowledge of his life and works was quite thrust 
in his way. He obviously could not have approached 
the subject in any task-burdened or merely perfunc- 
tory manner; nor has he done so. The work has 
been done con amove. The sum of Mr. Ainger's 
labours in connection with Lamb is by no means rep- 
resented in one or two volumes. His memoir of 
Lamb is an admirable piece of work, and unques- 
tionably the best biography of Lamb that we have. 
Besides this, he has edited, with instructive introduc- 
tions and useful notes, the essays and other writings 
of Lamb, making an edition destined to acceptance 
as final. 

Work closely allied to editing of the class re- 
ferred to is that of making anthologies, and here 
(with apologies to Mr. Stedman, who has come 
later), Palgrave must not be overlooked. Palgrave 
has the unique distinction of having acquired, 
merely by compiling an anthology, a degree of 
literary reputation such as comes only to authors 
who write very successful books. Palgrave, indeed, 
is known where many authors, properly to be called 
successful, are not known. His modest volume, 
" The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and 
Lyrics in the English Language," was published 
nearly forty years ago. Such has been its repute 



MODERN EDITING 75 

that not to know it is to argue one's self strangely 
unfamiliar with the books of the generations now 
past. Not only has the book gone through edition 
after edition, but it has given its name to one of 
the most successful series of books of our generation. 
There can be no doubt that the success of that series 
in very considerable degree was indebted to the 
name it bore and the distinguished company its 
volumes kept. 

Palgrave's friendship for Tennyson was another 
fact of moment in his career, — almost the only one 
of very particular note, although he was Professor 
of Poetry at Oxford, wrote verse himself, and pub- 
lished some volumes of prose. He was introduced 
to Tennyson in 1849 Dv a brother of Arthur Hal- 
lam, and Tennyson, as the story goes, rinding him 
less " superior " in manner than he had found 
other Oxford men to be, invited him to his lodg- 
ings, which were humble ones, in what is known as 
Camden Town Road. Tennyson there read to him 
some passages from the manuscript of " In Memo- 
riam." Thenceforth the friendship was lifelong. 
Death itself divided them by only five years. 

Tennyson had something to do with the prepara- 
tion of "The Golden Treasury." It was while 
walking with him near Land's End that Palgrave 
first informed Tennyson of his enterprise, which 
Tennyson approved at once, and in the prepara- 
tion of which he afterward gave advice. But this 
advice, while valuable and frequent, has never been 



y6 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

thought to be of such extent as to deprive Palgrave 
of any of the substantial credit which the prepa- 
ration of the collection conferred. His " Golden 
Treasury " will live as long as no one rises up 
to produce a better. And this compiler we are 
not likely to see for many years, if ever we see 
him. 



IX 

THE MECHANICAL SIDE OF BOOKS 

Readers whose knowledge of books goes back 
thirty years have often remarked the changes that 
have come over sizes, type, and binding. They 
are quite as remarkable as the changes which have 
completely transformed the Christmas book. For- 
merly the Christmas book was intended purely as a 
gift. It was a book by itself, useful in its way, 
but as literature a thing meant only for a season. 
It sold on its gorgeous binding and its pictures, 
and these were often so commonplace that the 
wonder ever since has been how a taste existed 
which could tolerate, not to say admire, them. 

While books have always been conspicuous 
among holiday gifts, the numbers thus used have 
enormously increased in late years. For a long 
period it was the custom of publishers to produce 
special holiday books which were of little use at 
any other time of the year — those resplendent 
quartos and folios for which there was no resting- 
place at home except on a centre-table or in a 
store-room. They were attractive to look at, but 
it was impossible to read them. Men read such 
books in earlier times, — their Bayle, their Eras- 

77 



yS OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

mus, their Shakespeare, when inclined desks offered 
solid places to hold books, when men did not 
understand that better book sizes existed, and when 
they had ampler leisure. 

No enlightened visitor to book-stores can fail to 
note the comparative absence of large books. The 
folio and quarto and even the octavo are conspicu- 
ous through absence. The display is dominated by 
duodecimos. The tendency is to make books much 
smaller than duodecimos, of which the popular 
" Temple Classics " may be cited as examples. 
Here we have evidence of return to a fashion as old 
at any rate as the first edition of Fielding's "Tom 
Jones." Even the holiday books have become fit 
for human hands to hold. If there be no royal 
road to learning, there are many easier roads than 
those which run over the steep grades and around 
the sharp curves which folios and quartos place in 
the way. The Christmas book in its contents must 
have intrinsic value ; cover and pictures must play 
subordinate parts. 

A similar change has come over the subscription 
book business. Costly folios and quartos no longer 
succeed. People do not want them. In large cities 
people commonly live in flats, hotels, and apartments, 
where it is impossible to house them. And therefore 
the publishers are adapting their manufactures to 
changed conditions. They make books that will go 
into small book-cases. They no longer count on 
centre-tables as repositories. 






THE MECHANICAL SIDE OF BOOKS 79 

In the auction rooms one often sees demonstrated 
the failure of the high hopes with which many sub- 
scription books of a former period were purchased — 
those costly folios and quartos issued in limited edi- 
tions, and the value of which purchasers were assured 
would advance. Rare, indeed, is the case where 
values have even been maintained, and very common 
the cases where the fall in value has been tremen- 
dous. Recently was heard the pitiful tale of a 
woman who, some years ago, had purchased a work 
of this class in ten volumes, paying $100 for each 
volume; in all, $1000 for her ten resplendent folios, 
— an investment which she believed was as good as 
money in an interest-paying bank. She now wished 
to sell her set, and in vain sought to get for it $60. 
In other words, she could not sell it for a sum repre- 
senting one year's interest at six per cent on the 
original purchase price. 

The change which has transformed books for sum- 
mer reading is of another sort, though none the less 
admirable. Back in the seventies the summer book 
was in the main a work of fiction, printed usually in 
small type, with two columns to the page, and bound 
in tasteless paper covers, — a book to read and then 
roll up for mailing to distant friends or throw into 
the waste-basket. It had a long and, for the pub- 
lishers, a profitable reign. More than one famous 
writer's books in piratical times were thus brought 
to the knowledge of readers. That style of book 
had its successors in other paper-covered books, 



80 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

many of them yellow in colour, and not a few of them 
might have been described as "yellow" in their con- 
tents, — unwholesome, unprofitable things, fit only to 
be read and forgotten. 

Newer times have brought better books. The 
book in paper covers has almost entirely disappeared, 
and it is an exit not to be regretted. In France its 
sway still holds, for in France customs change far 
less readily than here. It is buckram that has eman- 
cipated us. It is a great debt we owe to buckram. 
With its coming into dominance the covers of our 
least expensive books have taken on permanent quali- 
ties and artistic appearances. 

Indeed, the art of designing book covers has grown 
into one of the most familiar. arts of the day, though 
it is one of the latest. It cannot be untrue that 
thousands of books have been sold in late years 
because their covers were pleasing. It has been a 
delight to see them and to hold them. A new charm 
has come into the life of the literary editor, who now 
meets the small boy with his daily load of newly 
arrived books with an expectancy of pleasure that 
formerly had become rare. The burdensome pros- 
pect of a new accumulation of books to be reviewed 
has been lightened by a sense of the pleasure the 
covers will give. 

A wide welcome has attended these changes. 
Indeed, there can be little doubt that the enlightened 
publisher has had his full returns. Smaller books 
mean cheaper books, but at the same time books not 



THE MECHANICAL SIDE OF BOOKS 8 1 

less attractive to the eye than were the big ones of 
former times. Far less money has been put into 
their pictures, but good pictures, all the same, are 
there, made though they are by cheaper methods. 
Bindings more inexpensive are seen ; but they are 
radiant in artistic designs and pleasing colours. The 
cover, a thing once left to the binder's art, is now 
the product of an accepted artist. 

More and more has this change shown regard for 
what in strict sense is literature. Makers of gifts in 
choosing books bestow greater thought on the text 
than on the printing and binding. The old admoni- 
tion, " Do not judge a book by its binding," is losing 
its force. We are approaching a time when the 
binding of a book shall indicate something of its 
value inside, — when the Kiplings, as a matter of 
course, shall be well printed and the Hawthornes 
nobly bound. 

With what shabby garments many books now 
famous in American literature were presented in their 
early editions, and how in contrast do they stand with 
the garments Stevenson, Kipling, and Barrie have 
recently worn. Choice type, paper, and binding 
have been bestowed upon them. Those works 
appear in such splendour as awakens sad thoughts 
of the typographical habiliments in which Irving 
and Cooper were dressed. 

It is not alone in covers that change has come. In 
the contents of the holiday and summer books great 
advance has taken place. It is nowhere more re- 

G 



82 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

markable than in what are known as outdoor books, 
and especially those which deal exclusively with 
nature. Botany has been wonderfully popularized. 
Bird life has been made known to thousands who 
never hoped to understand it. The lore of fields 
and forests, the populations of the air, streams, and 
ponds, the things seen at roadsides, have acquired 
new value and many meanings for us all. 

To inquire into causes would take us far. But as 
there has been a vast movement of population city- 
ward, until farms are deserted and country land 
values fall, so has the city population developed a 
marked fondness for country life during part of the 
year. Thousands from cities now live for months in 
the country where were only hundreds twenty years 
ago. And with the joys of this change has come 
interest in gardens, in the flowers and trees of the 
forests, in birds of the air, and in fish of the streams. 
Something is owing to the bicycle, the golf links, and 
the wonderful enlightenment they have diffused over 
the whole land concerning rural neighbourhoods lying 
near us. 

Any list of summer books would of necessity have 
fiction for its greater part. But this is not so true 
now as formerly. The increase in books dealing 
with nature has proportionately been greater. 
Novels themselves exhibit this growth. The charms 
of life out of doors are more and more dwelt upon in 
fiction. Of this we have a striking example in James 
Lane Allen's "The Choir Invisible," that beautiful 



THE MECHANICAL SIDE OF BOOKS 83 

story of steadfastness, character, and pain, wherein 
the story proper charms us not more completely 
than do the author's splendid pictures of wild nature 
in a new land — pictures possible only to the pen of 
a rare mind and choice spirit. Mr. Allen's book 
speaks everywhere of profound love for the forest 
and its denizens. 

Society and civilization may take hope from the im- 
proved quality of summer books. The more Nature 
is understood, the better the most of us may become. 
" To the solid ground of Nature trusts the mind that 
builds for aye," wrote one of the wisest lovers of 
things on the earth's surface that ever lived. We 
are being taught to know Nature better as well as our 
fellows, and to understand her and them as we have not 
done before. We see again and again how our own 
mortal and immortal parts are like those of other men ; 
that the world is kin, and that among whatever classes 
we view it, elemental human nature is essentially one 
and the same product everywhere. 

Reference has been made to what are called trade 
books — those printed in large editions and sold 
in all bookstores. Changes quite as remarkable 
have been wrought among privately printed books 
and those issued in limited editions. Under an im- 
pulse, first started into vigorous life by Mr. Theodore 
L. De Vinne and the Grolier Club, and later propelled 
vigorously by William Morris, scores of private and 
semi-private presses have come into being from New 
York to Aiken, South Carolina, from East Aurora to 



84 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Chicago. Chief among all agencies in these matters 
has been Morris's Kelmscott Press. 

The death of Morris was widely regretted, for 
literature's sake and for the sake of good printing. 
The public who bought his books were quite un- 
prepared, at least in this country, to hear that with 
him would die the Kelmscott Press. An institution 
so well founded would seem to have been reasonably 
secure of life beyond the years of Morris. Men die, 
but their works may live on. 

Founded some six or seven years before Morris 
died, the Kelmscott Press became the most admired 
of contemporary printing houses. It absorbed the 
best taste and labour of its founder, and upon nothing 
that he ever did was his own personality stamped 
more deeply. Not only did he give his mind to bor- 
ders, bindings, paper, and ink ; he designed his own 
type — each letter of it, and each font used. He 
printed books as he devoutly believed that great and 
good books ought to be printed. Never to a printer's 
work went more consecration ; and whether or not 
we admire his type and his sizes as desirable for 
books in general, the splendour of his products must 
be conceded. Probably it was Morris's personal 
share in his work that accounted for the abandon- 
ment of the press. As had been feared, the fate of 
it became " an artistic necessity." No one remained 
to carry the work on. 

The London Academy has expressed a belief that 
his Chaucer alone will render Morris and his press 



THE MECHANICAL SIDE OF BOOKS 85 

"memorable for all time." "For all time" — ah, 
who can say that ? This is a world of changing fash- 
ions, and in the art of printing, as in most other arts, 
the taste of one time is Jinot the taste of another. 
The smallness of the editions will alone make the 
books scarce; indeed, in a sense they were scarce 
the day they were published, just as, in another sense, 
the Grolier books were and are scarce. Whether the 
future, therefore, will see them collected somewhat as 
Elzevirs are, or as the books of Aldus are, is another 
matter on which to prophesy would be vain. In what 
directions the book taste of the future may not run 
no man can tell. 



X 

LIBRARIANS AND THEIR INFLUENCE 

The American Library Association has been in 
existence about a quarter of a century. It was 
organized in a feeble way and in the midst of some 
discouraging predictions. But it has done more, 
probably, for what may be called the intellectual 
growth of libraries — the intelligent enlargement of 
their numbers, the widening of their educational influ- 
ence on proper lines — than all other forces which 
have been active in their behalf. Except for its work, 
one well might question if men like Mr. Carnegie ever 
could have been inspired to make such large invest- 
ments in posthumous fame. Perhaps the most strik- 
ing example of its influence, in a case which may be 
called personal, was the weight it had with President 
McKinley, in casting aside all other suggestions, and 
yielding to its recommendation that one of its most dis- 
tinguished and often honoured members, Mr. Herbert 
Putnam, be made Librarian of Congress. 

Of course there have been other weighty influences 
operating for the spread of libraries. First among 
them has been the enormous growth in the percen- 
tage of the population which reads books and thus 
creates an irresistible demand for collections accessi- 

86 



LIBRARIANS AND THEIR INFLUENCE 8? 

ble to the public, even in small towns and villages. 
Another that has been of greater weight than the 
public generally understands is the library schools, 
where have been raised up hundreds of capable 
young men and young women who have not only 
been taught to catalogue and classify books, but what 
books are worth buying and by what methods people 
may be induced to undertake more systematic and 
instructive reading. 

In a large way the gatherings of the association 
have been in themselves library schools. They are 
in no strict sense gatherings whose main purpose is 
the pursuit of pleasure. Regular and prolonged ses- 
sions are held for the discussion of extremely prac- 
tical questions in library work. No visitor can sit 
through one of the meetings and fail to be impressed 
by the zeal and intelligence with which such topics 
are taken up. Meetings are held annually in dif- 
ferent parts of the country. One year the place 
was Lakewood-on-Chautauqua, the next, Atlanta. 
Again, a meeting in Montreal was followed by one in 
Waukesha, Wisconsin. Wherever the place may be 
there is never lack of continuous interest, nor of those 
advantages which are derived from an exchange of 
ideas in private conversation. 

The remarkable fact has often been observed that 
even remote or distant places fail to prevent a large 
attendance. One such place was a small town un- 
known to most readers outside the Middle West, and 
yet the attendance was the largest which the associa- 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



tion had ever secured, the total reaching over 450. 
Nothing could better illustrate, on the one hand, the 
extent to which library interests have spread through- 
out the West, and, on the other, the enthusiasm with 
which librarians make long journeys to attend the 
annual gatherings. 

Pilgrimages to distant places are undertaken with 
difficulties — for one thing, a letting go of exacting 
duties at home, for another, the expense involved, and 
for a third, the reluctance which library trustees for- 
merly manifested and still to some extent do manifest, 
in permitting leaves of absence. But that large at- 
tendance proved, as others have proved, how success- 
fully these difficulties have been overcome. Indeed, 
matters have now reached a point where trustees not 
only permit absences with cheerfulness, but go them- 
selves to the meetings and become active participants 
in the discussions. 

In the autumn of 1900, at the annual meeting of 
the librarians of New York State, held at the Lake 
Placid Club, in the Adirondacks, it was decided to 
establish as a permanent institution what should be 
known as Library Week. Heretofore the associa- 
tion, during the ten years of its existence, had met 
each year in a different place, but the usefulness of 
that custom having, it is believed, exhausted itself, 
this permanent meeting-place was chosen. 

Under this system it was seen how it would be 
possible at all times for members to know precisely 
where their association would come together, the 



LIBRARIANS AND THEIR INFLUENCE 89 

surroundings amid which the meeting would be held, 
the cost of transportation, and other things which 
heretofore may have been indefinite or experimental. 
At that attractive spot in the Adirondacks, where 
more than 2000 acres have been secured by the club, 
with restrictions upon those who may enter the 
grounds, and where many other regulations con- 
duce to good order and agreeable surroundings, the 
association has found itself in possession of an ideal 
meeting-place. 

Not alone has the change resulted in a larger 
attendance from librarians and their assistants, but 
from other persons interested in libraries, including 
those most important bodies, boards of trustees. 
From them the attendance had formerly been lim- 
ited, but a greater degree of understanding between 
trustees and librarians has not failed to result in 
substantial good for both. There has also been 
secured some attendance from men of letters. Still 
better things in that line are anticipated. Mr. Stock- 
ton, for example, forsaking some remote lodge in the 
wilderness, may drop in to solve the " Lady or the 
Tiger" riddle. Mr. Mabie, from some camp-fire at 
the foot of Whiteface, may run over with a thought 
or two in that approved grip which he always carries 
on his shoulders. Dr. van Dyke, leaving behind 
some little river in the forest, and taking with him 
" Lady Greygown," may call around to discourse of 
books as well as sermons that are "straight." Harry 
Thurston Peck, with classical dictionaries and the 



90 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

pedagogical stool cast aside, may descend with an 
essay touching close to life and nature, borrowed for 
the occasion from Rafford Pyke. 

And so of the booksellers and bookbinders. They, 
too, have come to give and to receive hints of very 
special value. Binders have been able to learn that 
a flexible spinal column is as good for books as for 
men, and that bindings all white and gold, or arrayed 
in the splendours of the rainbow, when meant for cir- 
culating libraries, can be improved upon. 

In the establishment of Library Week, the New 
York association took the most significant step since 
its organization. A very few years ought to make 
this event widely known, and recognized all over the 
State as an annual occurrence toward which drift 
the new thoughts of a whole year, and from which 
proceeds much valuable inspiration for the work of 
the year to come. 

An attendance of about 175 persons at the second 
annual meeting under this plan already speaks im- 
pressively of widespread interest in library work. 
This represents twice the number who were present 
the first year. Not alone were New York librarians 
there, but the chiefs of some of the most prominent 
institutions in distant parts of the country. Occur- 
ring as the meeting did, just after schools and col- 
leges had begun the new year's work, when many 
librarians could not get away, the large attendance 
was still more impressive. 

Plans were carefully laid for widening still farther 



LIBRARIANS AND THEIR INFLUENCE 91 

the usefulness of libraries. Most important of these, 
perhaps, was the establishing of " library institutes," 
through which greater efficiency will be secured in 
the libraries of towns and villages, where at present 
primitive methods often prevail. Steps were also 
taken to secure greater publicity in all towns where 
libraries exist, as to the work and resources of the 
various collections, and thus to draw within the influ- 
ence of the libraries a larger number of people. 

In the summer of 1901 there was printed a de- 
tailed statement of the vast sums of money which, in 
the previous year, had been given by individuals in 
this country to libraries, the total rising to more than 
fifteen millions of dollars. Many of these givers no 
doubt had some distinct notion of the zealous and 
intelligent work which librarians are doing. They 
ought to have still more. No one familiar with the 
library associations can fail to see with what wisdom 
and devotion these large sums of money will be made 
useful to the public. Mr. Carnegie and other benefi- 
cent citizens may be well-informed in these matters, 
and they ought to find special satisfaction from any 
knowledge they may have. Librarians do not travel 
far, nor do they spend a week of time in discussion 
of the most practical and important problems that 
rise in their work, except through an interest in their 
calling, which, in view of their modest pecuniary 
rewards, it would be proper to describe as conse- 
cration. 

Of their work in behalf of American literature, as 



92 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

distinct from English, or foreign, an illustration is 
found in a list of two hundred books that have been 
recommended to the schools of Iowa. In Iowa has 
probably been given greater attention to village and 
school libraries than in any other of the Western 
States. The list is interesting not only as an expres- 
sion of judgment from a distant community, but as a 
distinct sign of growth in very important educational 
matters. 

The enormous increase of books which a few years 
have seen places at the disposal of schools so confus- 
ing a mixture of good and evil things that great care 
and ripe experience are necessary in the formation of 
safe judgments in preparing a selected list. The 
conclusions of most persons probably will be that 
Iowa has made a selection that calls for little serious 
criticism. The preponderance of books by American 
writers is a striking, as well as gratifying, feature 
of this list. Not twenty per cent of the books came 
from English writers, and the English authors who 
do appear are mainly authors who wrote for all time 
— Defoe and Bunyan, Thackeray and Dickens, Lamb 
and Scott, Ruskin and George Eliot — writers whom 
no list could well dispense with. 

Of English writers now living the list contains 
scarcely a representation. The living ones chosen 
are Americans — Mrs. Dodge and Burroughs, Scud- 
der and Fiske, Eggleston and Noah Brooks, with 
such other American names as Craddock, Sanborn, 
Matthews, Champlin, Wiggin, Burnett, Coolidge, 



LIBRARIANS AND THEIR INFLUENCE 93 

Jackson, and Alcott. The great departed were repre- 
sented equally well, — perhaps might have been still 
better, — Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Cooper, Mrs. 
Stowe, and many others. 

This strong leaning toward American authors may 
have its unfavourable side from the point of view of 
pure literature, though scarcely from any other vital 
point. A sense of nationality in literature, perhaps 
more than any other sense, has been needed in 
American common life. Books by American writers, 
dealing with American themes, can promote this feel- 
ing in young minds far better than other influences 
can promote it — better even than unfurled flags and 
marching militiamen. It takes deeper root in the 
character and becomes a more potent and permanent 
possession. 



XI 



THE PATHOS OF A MASTER'S FATE 



Typical of the fate of the most brilliant of ephem- 
eral writers is the fate that has overwhelmed Nathaniel 
Parker Willis. It has been the fashion of a genera- 
tion to speak slightingly of him and of his work, 
and that fashion has been revived whenever his 
writings have been called to public attention. If the 
remoteness of Willis from our times has served some- 
what to soften the terms in which judgment was 
formerly passed, the essential verdict remains what 
it was thirty or forty years ago. If ever a man of 
letters was a writer for his own day and for no other 
day, it was Willis. Not only his topics and his per- 
sonality, but his peculiar mental constitution, seem to 
have been such as made it impossible he should do 
anything entitled to survive even for fifty years. If 
he had any of the qualities of genius, it was capacity 
for work, which indeed he had in considerable 
abundance, and yet what he did appears always to 
have been done with so much ease that one is 
tempted to qualify the importance even of this 
quality. 

The last years of Willis's life, when he was making 
a brave struggle with misfortune, redeem his career 

94 



THE PATHOS OF A MASTER'S FATE 95 

from the charge of uniform and persistent worldliness, 
which at one time threatened to be justified for the 
whole of it. He fought a good fight at the end. His 
days at Glenmary also show that there was some- 
thing better in him than the world had seen during 
his four and a half years of pleasure and junketing 
abroad. One thinks kindly of Willis because he was 
contented at Glenmary, and one can almost share the 
pangs of real regret with which he gave up that re- 
treat. Again, in that brave struggle at the last, some 
ground might be found for an elaborate theory that 
Willis was the victim of precocious success and 
premature social triumphs. At the same time one 
might not find it difficult to write an exhaustive essay, 
with his life for illustration, to show that the hero 
and the dandy are not incompatible in one and the 
same individual. 

Willis came of good New England stock, and his 
home training left nothing to be desired on its 
religious side. Very trying is the story of his back- 
sliding at New Haven and the social career he ran 
there, with all its vanity and sentimental moonshine. 
Infinitely more easy is it to sympathize with the 
collegiate waywardness of Poe, to whom so little 
wise direction had been vouchsafed in youth. Poe's 
sins were great enough, but Poe had been a spoiled 
child; in his very recklessness afterwards one may 
discover a kind of courage and sincerity. Willis's 
crass heedlessness and his want of all serious aims 
quite exhaust the patience. He seems never in those 



96 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

days to have regarded this world as a reality, or the 
life before him as serious business. The world to 
him was rather a place to sing in and dance in. Early 
literary success, if it did not actually turn his head, 
came near doing so ; had his head been completely 
lost and disaster come, the results might have been 
better for Willis in the long run : he might then have 
seen his error and reformed his plan. Success fol- 
lowed upon success with accelerating speed, until ere 
he had reached his majority he was fairly intoxicated 
with social triumphs. New Haven did not set boun- 
daries to them. From New York in 1827 he wrote as 
follows : — 

" I staid in Stratford till Friday, and then the 
Johnsons offered me a seat in the carriage to New 
York. This, of course, was irresistible, and Friday 
night at 10 o'clock I was presented to the Mayor of 
the city, at a splendid levee. It was his last before 
leaving his office, and I never saw such magnificence. 
The fashion and beauty and talent of the city were 
all there, crowding his immense rooms, to show their 
respect for his services. I found many old acquaint- 
ances there and made some new ones, among the 
latter a Mrs. Brunson, as beautiful a woman as I 
ever saw, and her sister, Miss Catherine Bailey, also 
a most beautiful woman. At 2 or 3 o'clock I went 
home to Mr. William Johnson's, and in a glorious 
bed, with a good coal fire by my side, slept off the 
fatigues of a sixty miles' ride and four hours' dissipa- 
tion. On Saturday evening I went to a genuine 



THE PATHOS OF A MASTER'S FATE 97 

soiree at the great Dr. Hosack's. This man is the 
most luxurious man in the city, and his house is a 
perfect palace. You could not lay your hand on the 
wall for costly paintings, and the furniture exceeds 
anything I have seen." 

A young man from New England, of homely 
origin and not yet possessed of his college sheep- 
skin, who was getting on socially at this famous 
pace and who could write about it in that gleeful 
way, hardly contained promising material for a future 
man of letters of the class who work in silence to pro- 
duce books the world cannot let die. Vanity of vani- 
ties is written all over these early years. So soon as 
he had got away from home and from Andover there 
appears, in fact, for many years to have been scarcely 
anything else clearly visible in his headlong progress. 

It is true his best work was done before his life had 
reached its meridian ; he had a really national reputa- 
tion before he had left college ; but there is every- 
where much to qualify his success when we are asked 
to accept it as a reward of merit. He was inordi- 
nately fond of the praise he so easily won. Writing 
was to him a species of self-indulgence rather than a 
sacrifice. There was no baptismal fire about these 
young days. The baptismal fire came in Willis's old 
age. He bore it, however, and to his lasting honour 
be this recorded, with the fortitude of a brave and 
wiser man. 

His biographer, Professor Beers, speculates as to 
what would have been the result had Willis been per- 



98 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

mitted to end his days at Glenmary — whether or no 
his talents would have produced something richer and 
deeper than anything he has left. The question is 
interesting, and Professor Beers answers it rightly 
when he says, Willis's talent was " the expression of 
his temperament — fresh, facile, spontaneous, but 
impatient of continuance. He was dependent on 
the world about him for subjects and for impulses. 
His talent, as with all talent of this sort, did not ripen 
and grow with age. It was essentially the talent of 
youth and youthful feelings, and was nothing if not 
emotional, spontaneous, and superficial. 

" When health began to decay and youth was over, 
and his animal spirits had effervesced, life commenced 
to have a flat taste. The bloom was off. His writ- 
ing, too, as we have seen, was always closely related 
to his personal experiences, and as these grew tamer 
he had less and less to report, and his writings grew 
tame in proportion. With some, mere study and con- 
templation supply to a degree the ravages which time 
makes upon the freshness of young impressions. But 
it had been Willis's misfortune in youth that a prema- 
ture success deprived him of the discipline of early 
rebuffs, and had made a painful self-culture needless. 
He never drew much inspiration from books, and in 
later life read very little." 

Willis's life abroad would admit of lengthened dis- 
cussion and much moralizing. Its immense success 
might well puzzle any one who was a stranger alike 
to the Court of Lady Blessington and the personal 



THE PATHOS OF A MASTER'S FATE 99 

attractions of Willis. He shared for a time, says 
Professor Beers, in the pleasures of the titled aristoc- 
racy and the idle rich, " and he took to it like one to 
the manner born." Clubs, parks, great country 
houses, fine, haughty women, and the hereditary 
grace and indolence of generations " seemed no more 
than the birthright of this New England printer's 
boy." Wherever he went he made friends. He 
himself has told how he " dined with a Prince one 
day, and alone for a shilling in a cook shop the next," 
and how he was twice "entirely destitute of money in 
places where he had not one acquaintance." Few of 
the people whom he met in society suspected what 
thin ice he was skating on, or dreamed for an instant 
that this dashing young attache was dependent for 
his bread and butter on weekly letters to the news- 
papers. Three days after his arrival in London, 
where he was introduced through a letter from 
Landor, he wrote home as follows : — 

" What a star is mine ! All the best society of 
London exclusives is now open to me — me ! a some- 
time apprentice at setting types ! me ! with but a sou 
in the world beyond what my pen brings me, and 
with not only no influence from friends at home, but 
a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank 
heaven ! there is not a countryman of mine, except 
Washington Irving, who has even the standing in 
England which I have got in three days only. I 
should not boast of it if I had not been wounded 
and stung to the quick by the calumnies and false- 

ILfifC. 



100 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

hoods of every description which come to me from 
America. ... I lodge in Cavendish Square, the 
most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea 
a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I 
had been the son of the President, with as much as 
I could spend in the year." 

Professor Beers contends that Willis was not a mere 
tuft-hunter and social adventurer. Though he loved 
a lord, he also loved a commoner, and was not 
insensible to meanness and imbecility in the pos- 
sessor of a historic name. He found great delight 
in his London experiences, but they palled upon him 
at last, until he declared himself " fatigued to death 
with dinners and dissipations." To his fiancee he 
wrote that dissipation henceforth, if they indulged in 
it at all, would be her pleasure and not his. He had 
lived ten years in gay society, was " sick at heart of 
it," and wanted "an apology to try something else." 
Professor Beers says of the " Thoughts on the Bal- 
cony of Devonshire House at Sunrise after a Splendid 
Ball," written at this time, that they are one of his 
most genuine utterances : — 

Morn in the east ! How coldly fair 

It breaks upon my fevered eye ! 
How chides the calm and dewy air ; 

How chides the pure and pearly sky ! 

It was perhaps natural that a mind in this state 
should fly from one extreme to the other, that in 
leaving London and its vanities Willis should go to 
Glenmary with its mossy glens and running waters. 



THE PATHOS OF A MASTER'S FATE 1 01 

The " Letters from under a Bridge " were psycho- 
logically a fitting sequel to the " Pencillings by the 
Way." The farm at Glenmary comprised about two 
hundred acres, and here Willis was content to dwell 
for five years. His regret at leaving was unquestion- 
ably genuine. As has already been said, Glenmary 
redeems the career of Willis from the stain of whole- 
hearted worldliness. Even Boston must have thought 
better of him after he lived there. 

Why Boston did not love Willis it is easy to 
understand, but why it should have abused him so 
unmercifully is not so apparent. He was constantly 
in receipt of anonymous letters calling him a puppy, 
a rake, and harsher names. He was attacked in the 
newspapers as a frivolous and conceited dandy. 
From England he wrote to his mother that the mines 
of Golconda would not tempt him to return and live 
in Boston. There seems little room to doubt that 
he was abused outrageously. And yet no man was 
more ready to oblige another or to say good-natured 
things, and no man of letters surely was ever more 
free from literary jealousy. His kindness to Poe, 
when Poe stood most in need of friends, and the 
testimony he bore to some of Poe's most admirable 
personal qualities, should never be forgotten. 

Some of the opposition Professor Beers attributes 
to the fact that Willis was successful, that he was a 
favourite in society, and that, above all, he wore con- 
spicuously good clothes. There may be something in 
this explanation, but it covers only a small part of 



102 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

the ground. The true secret of the stern opposition 
lay deeper, and Professor Beers states it thus: 
" There was also something about his airy way of 
writing and the personality it suggested that was and 
is peculiarly exasperating to a certain class of serious- 
minded people, who resent all attempts to entertain 
them on the part of any one whom they cannot entirely 
respect." There is real insight in that statement. 
But more should be said in accounting for Boston. 
Boston knew how inferior was all of Willis's work to 
the work that other men in Boston were then doing. 
Those men were producing literature, while Willis 
was not, and yet Willis received practically all the 
honours — at least the apparent ones. 

The writings of Willis have fallen into neglect; 
that was predestined from the nature of them, and in 
the main this was quite deserved. His prose writings 
are, I believe, out of print, though his poems still 
have some sale — about two hundred copies annually. 
This approaches to something like oblivion. When 
a volume of selections from his prose writings came 
out about ten years ago, most readers born since 
1850 probably met them for the first time. The 
volume served some purpose, however, in widening 
public knowledge of a man who, with all his faults, 
did some real service to our literature. 

Professor Beers affirms that Willis's special gift to 
literature " was in his instinct for style." There was 
no style in America when he began to write. Cooper 
had none whatever, and Irving hardly had one that 



THE PATHOS OF A MASTER'S FATE 103 

could be called American. "The bright thought" 
of Willis's writings "interjected into the muddy 
stream that flows interminably through the maga- 
zines and annuals of the thirties and forties must 
certainly have seemed a fountain of refreshment." 
Granting all this, and no more can possibly be 
granted, it stands a slight residuum indeed. So 
much success, such unchecked popularity, so many 
books that every one read, — surely all these prom- 
ised to exact a stronger tribute from posterity. 

On the score of Willis's necessities, it should be said 
that he was all his days writing, not for fame or for 
public honours, but for dear life itself, and this in a 
time when pure literature was paid not better than 
hod-carrying. If Willis chose to write what he could 
sell at good price, than write what he believed would 
live, — in other words, if he preferred Willis's way 
to Hawthorne's way, — perhaps it is only the stern 
moralist who would condemn him. He at any rate 
had small literary ambition, and scarcely pretended 
to be more than he was, for which some credit is due 
to him. He was no rival of the men who have sur- 
vived him. But surely this was not the fault of 
Willis : he was incapable of becoming their rival. 
He had talents, but lacked noble ambition. Therein 
lies the pathos of his life. 



XII 

THE BURNING QUESTION 

While this flood has been rising, the world already 
was full of books. Hundreds of thousands of them, 
and perhaps a million or two, have been produced since 
men began to print, — great books a few of them, 
which to generations of wise men have been more 
cherished than lands or houses, bonds or precious 
stones. Not a few of them have been constantly- 
reprinted only to be crowded into neglect by the 
latest popular novel, a thousand copies perhaps being 
sold of each where one hundred thousand or three 
hundred thousand of a novel found purchasers. Not 
many of these new books have been in any sense 
indispensable. Books of that sort come only in a gen- 
eration, but here and there were books capable of 
creating wholesome joy and giving intellectual profit. 
Against their survival above the crowd of ephemeral 
novels there existed no alarming danger ; the danger 
threatened not the books but those who would not 
read them — neither them nor the great old books, 
the classics of our tongue, that were born with mes- 
sages between their covers fit for the heart of man 
in all seasons and beneath all roof-trees. 

To be known as the author of a book ought to 
104 



THE BURNING QUESTION 105 

mean something more than to write sixty thousand 
words and get them printed. A true book is not 
alone a mass of printed words bound between covers. 
All true books have souls, an adjunct which scarcely 
one in a hundred so-called books could be said to 
possess. The pity of it all is that in this flood the 
few books among them all that possess the breath of 
enduring life must struggle so long in swirling waters 
or get stranded in marshes where thrive the unworthy 
and profitless thousands, modest worth waiting so 
long for any kind of recognition. 

A step in the direction of better influences was 
taken within the past few years at the first public 
meeting of the National Institute of Art and Letters. 
From it should have sprung an inspiration. Ad- 
dresses by Charles Dudley Warner, then threatened 
with the illness from which he soon afterwards died, 
and by Dr. Henry van Dyke, sounded notes of warn- 
ing in tones not to be mistaken. They were indeed 
trumpet calls. Selected as the members of the Insti- 
tute had been by the Social Science Association, its 
membership represented what is best in contem- 
porary thought and purposes. 

How to restrain the excessive output of books is in- 
deed a problem which only the wisest should attempt to 
solve. Such enormous publishing plants have been 
established, representing great investments, that we 
are confronted at the outset with what is perhaps the 
most serious aspect of all this question. Obviously 
the only way which may, at the same time, keep this 



106 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

capital employed and promote the interests of lit- 
erature, lies in the production of new works that are 
good, and the reprinting of older works whose rank 
and worth have become fixed. Sad it is to reflect 
how many [-thousands of readers acquainted with 
"The Heavenly Twins" are ignorant of "The Wa- 
verley Novels " ; how many have an intimate acquaint- 
ance with " Lyrics of Lowly Life " who never read 
" The Ode on Intimations of Immortality " ; how 
many are smilingly familiar with " David Harum " 
who know not Landor's name. 

Reform must come, not so much from the publish- 
ers as from conditions which may be promoted or 
created outside of them. Two special agencies for 
that work already exist. One is the librarian, who 
with the splendid advances made, not only in the 
number of libraries, but in the intelligence and 
thoroughness with which they are managed, has ac- 
quired opportunities in this direction such as never 
before existed. The other is the organs of literary 
intelligence and criticism, which in the size of their 
constituencies, and their power for good, have notably 
increased in very recent years. 

It is a striking fact that these opportunities have 
thus far been attended, not by a restriction of un- 
worthy literature, but by its increase, thus showing 
what golden opportunities have been allowed to pass. 
It may be true that efforts, in some instances, have 
been wisely consecrated to the highest duties, but the 
depressing fact remains, as Dr. van Dyke has said, 



THE BURNING QUESTION 10? 

that so many who " should be the leaders of the 
public have become its courtiers." In other words, 
librarians and periodicals, instead of becoming guides, 
have been content to take places as mere followers. 
Thus they have aided in promoting the circulation 
of what is merely popular, striking, or perhaps sensa- 
tional. They have gone with the tide, this swelling 
flood-tide of books pouring down the channels of 
time's stream every year to the number of many 
thousands. They have merely reflected and given 
new impulses to conditions which an unguided public, 
left to itself, has created. 

But it is noteworthy that on the programme for 
the meeting of the New York Library Association in 
the autumn of 1901, a prominent topic for discussion 
was " Book Selection." Librarians generally regard 
this as the most perplexing problem which confronts 
them — what books to select for purchase. It is 
the very foundation of their work and influence, and 
from it proceeds the most important results they 
accomplish in directing public taste. But in these 
matters they are all dependent, largely, upon opinions 
which reach them from others, and notably from 
critical journals, since no librarian can possibly find 
the time to read any large percentage of the books 
published every year. When librarians have read 
the critical opinions, there still exists a large domain 
in the matter of choice which reviewers do not and 
cannot cover from the librarians' points of view. 

Reviews of books do not always, indeed perhaps 



108 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

only now and then do they, tell a librarian whether a 
certain book ought to go into a particular library. 
Local conditions vary widely; the appropriation 
available may be large or small; the community to 
which the library ministers may be a highly intelli- 
gent one, or it may be the reverse. 

Most librarians understand how great is the need 
for some potent force which shall restrict the present 
devotion of readers to books that are ephemeral. 
Something, perhaps, can be done by critical journals 
through not giving large publicity to such works; 
something already has been and is still done by them, 
and undoubtedly more might be done. But libra- 
rians are in a position to do things even greater. 

Mr. William E. Foster in establishing what he 
calls a " standard library " at Providence has under- 
taken a work of the highest significance in this line. 
Cordial and unanimous approval has been bestowed 
upon it by many eminent librarians. He placed 
before his readers a collection of what he called 
"books of power," borrowing the phrase from De 
Quincey, of which books large numbers of readers prob- 
ably knew nothing more than the names, if so much 
as these. It comprises the world's best literature, 
ancient as well as modern, and his purpose was thus 
to remind readers, who give excessive devotion to 
ephemeral books, that there is something else in the 
world entitled to their attention. 

Meanwhile Mr. Henry L. Elmendorf of the Buf- 
falo Public Library has set apart a collection brought 



THE BURNING QUESTION 1 09 

together on somewhat broader lines, and embracing 
not only "books of power," but works of other per- 
manent rank and utility in the life of man. Mr. 
Elmendorf's collection aims at meeting not only the 
scholar's needs, but those of the active and intellec- 
tual man of the world. Still more recently Mr. John 
Cotton Dana, librarian of the City Library of Spring- 
field, Massachusetts, on retiring from that city to as- 
sume charge of the Newark Public Library, was able 
to announce that after four years spent there he had 
reduced the proportion of fiction read by twenty-four 
per cent. 

Of late years there have been many signs, which 
those who look closely could observe, that a reaction 
ere long would come against the overwhelming devo- 
tion of readers to popular fiction at the expense of 
more serious reading. The publishers themselves 
have believed that a reaction was bound to come 
within a reasonable period. Mr. Dana clearly did 
not wait for it, but took matters in his own hands, 
and, by the exercise of some kinds of force or art of 
which he seems to be a master, brought about this 
very large reduction. Mr. Dana proceeded on some- 
what different lines from Mr. Foster and Mr. Elmen- 
dorf, but let us hope they may reach results parallel 
with his. 

The librarians of the country are the main hope of 
society. They, in a measure, can control their out- 
put — not perhaps as autocrats, but through silent 
and tactful influences. It is useless for critical 



110 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

journals to denounce this class of literature. The 
results most commonly are to promote its circulation 
by calling attention to it. At best they can become 
influential only by the exercise of silence. They 
may select from the enormous flood the books which 
seem best and ignore the others. It is usually be- 
yond their province to take up old books, since crit- 
ical journals exist in the world for the purpose of 
dealing with new ones. But the librarian has within 
his walls the world's store of great and good books. 
He likes nothing better than to see his readers take 
them home, and in numberless ways he can induce 
them to do so. Mr. Dana has employed the avail- 
able methods with the utmost skill. 

These steps in libraries should serve as the begin- 
ning of a movement eventually to become general, 
and whose coming the librarians' annual meetings 
may accelerate, until they become a still more benefi- 
cent force in the communities where they exercise 
their offices. Not one of them but will acknowledge 
how wearisome becomes the task of giving out to 
readers trivial and commonplace literature, which 
literally is here to-day and gone to-morrow ; while 
books of power and permanence, books that will 
endure while civilization lasts, stand neglected on 
their shelves. 

There is, after all, some refuge from this deluge — 
an ark quite as seaworthy and capacious as the one 
Noah built, would men only get on board. The 
printing press and the bindery may send forth upon 



THE BURNING QUESTION in 

the patient public their thousands of new books 
every year ; but it is not necessary that our homes 
and firesides shall be invaded. We still possess the 
inalienable privilege of not giving hospitality to other 
books than those which are worthy of esteem. We 
may peremptorily decline to be imposed upon by the 
enemies of our welfare and peace. Meanwhile to 
the publishers' cellars and garrets, to the auction 
room and the peddler's cart, unwelcome books may 
be forced to go. 



PART II 
DEEP WATERS AND MAIN CHANNELS 



BOOKS THAT LIVE ON THROUGH THE YEARS 

The supreme merit of a great book is that its value 
remains with the lapse of time ; it does not go out of 
fashion ; it becomes an actual addition to one's pos- 
sessions and remains lifelong. The pleasure it gives 
is capable of constant renewal and even increase, for 
who can say when he has derived his last or his 
keenest pleasure from a truly great author ? 

It is a familiar discovery for men to find as they 
grow in years that they grow in appreciation of the 
best books. No man ever opens Shakespeare with- 
out finding something new, and the same is true of 
Milton and Chaucer, of Byron and Wordsworth, of 
Landor and Thackeray, of Hawthorne and Fielding. 
Here are stanch and lifelong friends who never 
weary us, who are always hospitable and in good 
temper, and who can be trusted to maintain faithfully 
more than half the friendship. 

The last word can never be said in praise of books. 
Praise began at J the very beginning of knowledge. 
The rude savage praised written records when he 
could not understand them ; the wise have praised 
books with all the laudation speech could frame. 
Perhaps it is Emerson who has composed the most 

"5 



Il6 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

expressive words : " Consider what you have in the 
smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest 
and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil- 
ized countries in a thousand years have set in best 
order the results of their learning and wisdom. The 
men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, 
impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette ; but 
the thought which they did not uncover to their 
bosom friends is here written in transparent words to 
us the strangers of another age." 

The future probably could offer little hope that the 
number of ephemeral books will decline. They are 
more likely to increase, and the ratio will be a large 
one. But it is certain that good books will live and 
bad ones die. It is with books as with all art — the 
art that is meant for all time. In old Athens once 
stood thousands of houses, but only one Parthenon 
was there. And still may our poet sing : — 
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
As the best gem upon her zone. 

In Italy have been erected millions of buildings, 
but the Roman Pantheon, Saint Mark's at Venice, 
and Saint Peter's have survived them all. Let us 
get our five thousand or our ten thousand books 
every year; it will still remain true that not more 
than one really great book can be produced in a hun- 
dred years. We must remember how long Italy 
waited before Virgil came, that " wielder of the state- 
liest measure ever moulded by the lips of man " ; 
how long she waited for Dante ; how long England 



BOOKS THAT LIVE ON THROUGH THE YEARS WJ 

waited for Shakespeare, and still waits for another 
Shakespeare ; how France waited for Moliere, and 
Spain for Cervantes. Along with these divinely 
gifted men came throngs of second, third, and fourth 
rate writers — whole regiments of them — who had 
their brief reward and then, each with his book in 
hand, walked silently and forever into the unknown 
beyond. 

These highest creations of the mind survive all 
earthly changes. Material works, having served 
their day, pass into hopeless ruin. States rise and 
fall. The world's maps are again and again recon- 
structed. The speech of men dies, and a new speech 
is born again. But great writings survive all kinds 
of destruction, whether of man or nature. From 
state to state they are passed on, and from tongue to 
tongue. Indeed, they alone keep ancient tongues 
alive. Because Palestine, Greece, and Rome had 
literatures, their life and thought are known to us and 
have formed our own. Only in name are those 
worlds dead. The worlds really dead are those of the 
Euphrates and Nile valleys, — Assyria, Babylonia, 
and Egypt, — dead because neither of them found a 
voice, a voice that could speak their life and thought 
into the minds of us — men of alien races, of another 
clime, of a far-distant age. 

The Claudian aqueduct, that splendid monument of 
Roman genius, stretching far across the Campagna 
from the Alban Mountains to the city of Rome, 
whither it bore the water supply, still, with its broken 



Il8 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

arches, here and there spans that lonely plain, a 
mere curiosity for tourists, its utility gone, its archi- 
tect's name forgotten. Meanwhile, schoolboys, in 
new tongues, literally as Casca said, in the words 
Shakespeare gave him, " In states unborn and accents 
yet unknown," memorize the poems of Virgil and the 
songs of Horace. The ruins of the Alhambra domi- 
nate the hills of Spain above Granada ; the cries 
of birds are heard among its dismantled walls. 
Meanwhile, its mournful tale has become familiar to 
us because Irving told it. Even the story of Spain, 
the story of half a score of centuries, of a thousand 
eventful years, has been unknown to generations of 
men and women who have kept among the treasures 
of their homes the tale Cervantes told. 

We may be absolutely certain that whatever is 
good will not die. Wherever exists a book that adds 
to our wisdom, that consoles our thought, it cannot 
perish. Critics may assail it with their hundreds of 
columns. Its own generation may neglect it. Fire 
may burn up the entire edition, save a handful of 
copies ; and yet that book will live. Nothing is so 
immortal as mere words, once they have been spoken 
fitly or divinely. A good book die ! We shall 
sooner see the forests cut away from every hill- 
side, the volume of water in great rivers run dry ; 
walls built of granite or travertine lying prostrate 
on the ground. Critics may go right or may go 
wrong. It matters not. There exists in the world 
that eternal tribunal, greater far than they, its ver- 



BOOKS THAT LIVE ON THROUGH THE YEARS 119 

diets final and infallible, — the central heart of cul- 
tured mankind. 

In great books we have what is best in the men 
who wrote them. Their work, in so far as human 
work can ever be, was disinterested. It was done 
with small hope of any adequate pecuniary reward. 
It was done because of a faith, often sublime, that 
it was worth doing for the world's sake. It was done 
in the face of disheartening circumstances, — in pov- 
erty, in sickness, and in need of bread; and the 
greater the book, the greater the discouragements 
under which it often was produced. Witness Dante's 
poem, composed with his soul on fire. Witness Mil- 
ton's, paid for in that curious sum, a mere " tip " as 
it were. Witness in our own day Hawthorne's tales, 
written for $3 each ; or Fitzgerald's version of old 
Omar's deathless song, now read the whole world 
round, but of which the unsalable first edition of 
only 500 copies was offered on a bargain counter at 
two cents per copy. 

" Work done with small hope of any adequate pecu- 
niary reward" — such was theirs. But of other re- 
wards, what a store have great writers not reaped ? — 
the purest, most lasting fame that men ever gain. Be- 
fore the fame of great authors all other fame " pales 
its ineffectual fires." The renown of great soldiers, 
princes, and lawgivers — the Alexanders, Hannibals, 
Caesars, Cromwells, and Marlboroughs, the golden- 
crowned Charleses, Henrys, and Louises, the Solons 
and Justinians, — all these go down into obscurity in 



120 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

that " fierce light " which beats about the Homers, 
the Dantes, the Virgils, the Shakespeares, the 
Miltons. 

The men who did battle around the mighty walls 
of ancient Troy, Hector, and Achilles, fair Helen 
herself, had perished utterly, had not Homer sung 
his undying song. The glory in which Solomon 
arrayed himself was not only inferior to that worn 
by the lilies of the field, but less than the glory he 
has gained through the Book of Proverbs and that 
" Song of Songs which is Solomon's." David, king 
of Israel, might have become a shadowy name to us 
all, had not David's name been linked forever with 
the Book of Psalms. Julius Caesar remains far less 
familiar as the founder of the Roman Empire than 
as the author of that book in which he tells us that 
" all Gaul is divided into three parts." Those men 
in power who made miserable the life of Dante, pur- 
suing him even in his grave, so that Byron could 

write, — 

Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, 
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding sea, 

have been utterly forgotten by generations who have 
known by heart Dante's immortal epic of the life 
hereafter. The throng of kings and kinglets, of 
princes, grand dukes, and Counts Palatine, who 
dominated the German states in Goethe's day, 
have perished from the thoughts of thousands to 
whom "Faust" has become a household word. A 
world that is still held captive by "Jane Eyre" has 



BOOKS THAT LIVE ON THROUGH THE YEARS 121 

forgotten who was prime minister of England when 
Charlotte Bronte wrote that book, or who were the 
men that led the armies and the fleets of Europe to 
the siege of Sebastopol. Indeed, the day may yet 
come when Lincoln's administration shall remain less 
familiar in men's minds than those immortal words 
— not three hundred words all together — which Lin- 
coln spoke on the field of Gettysburg. 

Surely it will be worth while to know that, in our 
day and generation, we gave our time, not to merely 
popular books, but to those everlastingly good ; not 
to the evanescent, but to the enduring ; not to books 
that perish as perish newspapers, but to those meant 
for the heart and soul of man in all ages — books 
that will not die; books that have immortal souls; 
books that make for righteousness. 



II 

WRITERS AND SOMETHING MORE 

The seventieth birthday of Tolstoi, which occurred 
a few years ago, marked also the completion of fifty 
years of Tolstoi's activity as a writer. The event 
was duly observed in New York, where a dinner, 
intended to be " an appreciation by his American 
admirers of the genius of the great Russian novelist 
and historian," took place. Not since Stevenson 
died, and a vast concourse of people gathered in a 
public hall to commemorate his life, had a like tribute 
been paid in this country to an author. In each case 
we may be certain that the tribute was evoked quite 
as much by the author's character as by his literary 
genius ; in fact, had character been wanting, the 
tributes would not have been paid at all. 

This is a consoling discovery to make at any time, 
— that men and women reserve their best honours for 
character rather than for achievement. By that res- 
ervation they stamp more conspicuously with ap- 
proval the things that make best for righteousness 
in the world. Character is indeed chief among all 
forces developed in human life. In heroes of the 
author class there always remains something finer 
than anything they wrote. Conspicuously true of 

122 



WRITERS AND SOMETHING MORE 123 

Sir Walter Scott, it is scarcely less true of Stevenson, 
and is perhaps still more true of Tolstoi. Tolstoi's 
writings have carried his name far, and will carry- 
it to still other generations. He has made Russia 
familiar to thousands for whom that land, save as a 
brute force in war, remained a land unknown. They 
had no interest in that vast but voiceless empire until 
Tolstoi pictured in moving story the burden and 
sorrows of life there, giving it a voice all men heard. 

When men saw that Tolstoi was not alone a writ- 
ing man, that he carried out in his own life the simple 
Christian faith he preached, living as live the poor, 
selling his goods to feed the poor, he rose to a hero's 
place. As an author his name has literally gone 
round the world. As a man the impression of his 
character has been set deep in the world's central 
heart — a far finer, nobler, rarer thing to make 
note of. 

Something of this saving power has kept alive the 
history Clarendon wrote. Much more widely read 
in the past than now, that book will long survive in 
the thoughts of the elect of this world, the compe- 
tent few, the readers who have sound literary under- 
standing. Purely as historian Clarendon has not 
first rank. He saw little beyond the things imme- 
diately around him ; he lacked breadth of view ; his 
history is partisan, and he was an advocate on a 
losing side. 

Clarendon has been valued for his style. Because 
of that his books will survive among the studious 



124 0UR LITERARY DELUGE 

and learned to remote times. His style had stateli- 
ness and even grandeur. The nobleman was writ 
large in it. He could not set pen to paper but it 
bore the impress of character and the splendour of 
great station. Those portraits he drew of contem- 
poraries must live with our literature. They are as 
vital and distinct as any that etcher has produced. 

From Tolstoi and Clarendon let us turn to an 
American woman. An anecdote of Louisa M. Al- 
cott's childhood, told by the wife of Nathaniel 
Hawthorne, is that one morning at breakfast she 
suddenly broke the silence with a laugh, as she 
exclaimed, " I love everybody in dis whole world." 
Her character, as disclosed in the memoir published 
soon after her death, shows that Miss Alcott through 
life cheerfully devoted all that she had of mind, 
strength, and estate to the comfort and happiness 
of other people. Her father was an idealist, without 
fortune, possessed of faculties bordering on genius, 
but for which the world offered no market. Upon 
his daughter devolved the main share in the family 
support. When she could not contribute to it by 
teaching she tried sewing, or became a governess, 
or went out to service. 

Finding she had a talent for writing stories, she 
employed that to the best of her powers, and for the 
same ends. She often thought out stories while busy 
with sewing. Whatever her hands found to do she 
did cheerfully. If a sad, this is also an inspiring 
story : few more notable have come to public know- 



WRITERS AND SOMETHING MORE 125 

ledge in the lives of women in our day. Its splendour 
and nobility should long survive, and many thousands 
who read her books have been grateful for knowing 
how cheerful, brave, and beautiful her own life was. 
She might have married advantageously. She had 
more than one offer and many attentions she did not 
care for ; but her heart was bound up in her family. 
She could not contemplate her own interests as some- 
thing separate from theirs. She died Louisa Alcott, 
and honoured be her name. 

Before Miss Alcott's time there lived another New 
England woman whose name must be recalled here. 
In the summer of 1 901, on the south shore of Long 
Island, near where she had been lost in the wreck of 
a steamer fifty years before, a memorial was set up to 
Margaret Fuller. In her own day she had been a 
dominant personality in our literature, but her col- 
lected writings give no adequate impression now of 
the wide esteem among men of discernment which 
her endowments secured. 

Probably the fact that she was a pioneer among 
women who earned livelihoods by writing had much 
to do with Margaret Fuller's ascendency. What she 
accomplished was in that day a great thing for a 
woman to do. Probably there have lived since her 
time at least a score of women equally accomplished 
as writers. Literature is now a vocation widely fol- 
lowed by women; they have achieved marked suc- 
cess in it, some of them in lines parallel with her 
own, others in creative fields to which she did not 



126 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

aspire, and in which success for her might have been 
impossible. If it be not so much what she actually 
wrote as the advance step she took in intellectual 
work done by women, if she has not survived as a 
living personality, she is at least a historic figure, 
and the world has discovered that there was some- 
thing finer in Margaret Fuller than in her books. 

Jane Austen's life was among the least eventful in 
literary history, — her home a rural one, her father 
a village rector, her sole knowledge of general and 
select society derived from journeys to towns like 
Winchester and Bath and occasional ones to London. 
Out of this experience she learned what she knew of 
the world beyond her father's door. It must long 
remain interesting to study how she acquired that 
knowledge of life and character which her books so 
amply disclose. Produced as they were in provincial 
surroundings, there is nothing provincial about them. 
Her grasp and self-command, her certainty of touch, 
are such as only the real masters of literary art have 
shown. The reader feels as if she had known life at 
its fullest expression, had travelled far, and dwelt in 
a richly equipped society. 

But we are apt to forget that men and women are 
much the same in small communities as in large ones ; 
that the springs of action and the directions conduct 
takes may be observed in a rural parlour no less than 
in a palatial city drawing-room, in a country house in 
Hants as well as in a mansion in London. It is the 
observer, not the place of observation, that counts. 



WRITERS AND SOMETHING MORE 127 

" Hundreds of people can talk, to one that can 
think," says Ruskin, "and thousands can think, for 
one that can see." Jane Austen was the one among 
thousands. Here again must Ruskin be quoted : 
" The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this 
world is to see something and tell what it saw." 
This parson's daughter, in a far-off Hants village, 
wrote books which made Scott despair, because to 
him was vouchsafed only " the big bow-wow strain," 
and which generations have placed among the highest 
literary creations from female hands. 

In her own field she has never been equalled. 
She stands alone and alone will stand. To present 
female characters in their finest aspects has ever 
been the despair of men, and, if not as often the 
despair of women, again and again have women 
failed in attempts to present it. If Jane Austen's 
Elizabeth Bennet be not the finest creation of this 
sort in all fiction, where shall we find its equal ? It 
is more than twenty years since I read " Pride and 
Prejudice," but the recollection of that high-souled, 
sound-hearted gentlewoman has survived the wreck 
of much baser matter and the crash of many other 
worlds. 

That Miss Austen knew full well the exact range 
of her powers must become manifest to all readers 
who reflect. She never went out of her proper path, 
never beyond her depth. Even the suggestion of the 
librarian of the Prince Regent, that " a historical ro- 
mance, illustrative of the august House of Cobourg, 



128 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

would just now be very interesting," could not mis- 
lead her. " I could no more write a romance than an 
epic poem," she boldly made reply. " I could not sit 
seriously down to write a serious romance under any 
other motive than to save my life ; and if it were in- 
dispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into 
laughing at myself or at other people, I am sure I 
should be hanged before I had finished the first chap- 
ter." There are thousands who have shared the 
regret recorded in his journal by Sir Walter Scott, 
"What a pity such a gifted creature died so early! " 

For more than a generation Mrs. Oliphant pro- 
duced novel after novel, and essay after essay, not to 
mention many books of a more ambitious and serious 
nature. Her readers have been limited to no one 
nationality, no hemisphere, no zone. That her books 
have given delight to many thousands need not be 
said. None of them great books — among them all 
(and they number perhaps a hundred) not one that 
will penetrate far into the new century — there is 
scarcely one that has not been read with pleasure, 
not to say with profit. She produced them so rap- 
idly that the public long since marvelled until mar- 
velling from exhaustion ceased. 

With the appearance of the memoir of Mrs. Oli- 
phant soon after her death many things were made 
clear. In a single sentence she disclosed the whole 
story. " I have written," said she, " because it gave 
me pleasure, because it came natural to me, because 
it was like talking or breathing, because of the big 



WRITERS AND SOMETHING MORE 129 

fact that it was necessary for me to work for my 
children." Pleasure in work, facility in doing the 
work, and stern necessity for an income on which to 
rear children, — these facts explain the literary output 
of a woman who, judged by the volume of her work 
and the circumstances in which it was produced, must 
be accounted one of the striking figures in the literary 
history of her time. Indeed, it would be quite natu- 
ral to pronounce her a woman of the heroic type, were 
it not that all things were so easy to her. Her life 
indeed seems seldom to have been wanting in sun- 
shine. Sorrows of the deepest, cares of the sternest, 
something almost tragic, did indeed darken her door 
many times, but she was never in despair. In old 
age she could say of these things : — 

" I have had trials which — I say it with full know- 
ledge of all the ways of mental suffering — have been 
harder than sorrow. I have lived a laborious life, with 
incessant work, incessant anxiety — and yet so strange, 
so capricious, is this human being that I would not say 
I have had an unhappy life. I wonder whether this 
is want of feeling or mere temperament and elasticity, 
or if it is a special compensation. ' Weren't my heart 
licht, I wad dee.' 

" Economizing, I fear, very little, never knowing 
quite at the beginning of the year how the ends would 
come together at Christmas, always with troublesome 
debts and forestalling of money earned, so that I had 
generally eaten up the price of a book before it was 
printed, but always — thank God for it ! — so far sue- 



130 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

cessful that, though always owing something, I 
never owed anybody to any unreasonable amount, or 
for any unreasonable extent of time, but managed to 
pay everything, and do everything, to stint nothing, 
to give them all that was happy and pleasant and of 
good report, through all those dear and blessed boyish 
years. I confess that it was not done in the noblest 
way, with those strong efforts of self-control and econ- 
omy which some people can exercise. I could not do 
that, or at least did not; but I could work." 

Mrs. Oliphant seems to have had no illusions as to 
the artistic merits and literary value of her work. 
She always knew she was not doing exactly her best, 
and that what she wrote could last only for a little 
time : — 

" I pay the penalty in that I shall not leave any- 
thing behind me that will live. What does it matter ? 
Nothing at all now — never anything to speak of. At 
my most ambitious of times I would rather my chil- 
dren had remembered me as their mother than in any 
other way, and my friends as their friend. I never 
cared for anything else. And now that there are no 
children to whom to leave any memory, and the friends 
drop day by day, what is the reputation of a circulating 
library to me? Nothing, and less than nothing — a 
thing the thought of which now makes me angry, that 
any one should for a moment imagine I cared for that, 
or that it made up for any loss." 

In this passage she has disclosed a key to the secret 
— if secret there be — as to her failure ever to rise to 



WRITERS AND SOMETHING MORE 13 1 

the higher level of Charlotte Bronte or George Eliot. 
Mrs. Oliphant was wanting in literary ambition as a 
dominant passion. Her true ambition was reserved 
for home and children. Authorship was nothing 
more than a means to an end, and that end not per- 
sonal to herself, but the well-being and happiness of 
others. When her children were dead, and she con- 
fessed her complete indifference to reputation, we see 
how the children had been all in all to her, and mere 
authorship nothing. One passage, indeed, perhaps 
shows that larger fame and longer literary life might 
not have been unwelcome. It is one in which she 
refers to George Eliot and George Sand ; but even 
the fame of these scarcely aroused a feeling that 
could be taken as jealousy : — 

"These two bigger women did things which I 
have never felt the least temptation to do, but how 
very much more enjoyment they seem to have got 
out of their life, how much more praise and homage 
and honour. I would not buy their fame with the 
disadvantages, but I do feel very small, very obscure, 
beside them, rather a failure all around, never secur- 
ing any strong affection, and throughout my life, 
though I have had all the usual experiences of women, 
never impressing anybody — what a droll little com- 
plaint — why should I ? I acknowledge frankly that 
there is nothing in me — a fat, little, commonplace 
woman, rather tongue-tied — to impress any one; 
and yet there is a sort of whimsical injury in it that 
makes me sorry for myself." 



132 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

One sentence in that paragraph — "I would not 
buy their fame with the disadvantages " — has a 
sound of honest pride and pleasure which goes still 
further to emphasize the mother-side and the woman- 
side of Mrs. Oliphant as things paramount. By 
means of authorship she was able to rear and educate 
her children and her brother's children to her life 
purposes. Authorship had little or no other value. 
All of which means that there was something finer in 
Mrs. Oliphant's life than in anything she has written. 

Now and then it has been said, as a thing for pity, 
that with a smaller strain upon her income, with 
greater ease of life, and freedom from care, Mrs. 
Oliphant might have produced a masterpiece. We 
may seriously doubt this. In those circumstances 
she could scarcely have done better. Incentive would 
have been wanting. More than one masterpiece 
has been produced in circumstances quite as humble, 
financially, as her own. The inmost depths of this 
woman's life are disclosed in her simple and pathetic 
statement that " to bring up the boys for the service 
of God was better than to write a fine novel." 



Ill 

BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 

Historians, as has been commonly remarked, can 
seldom accomplish great purposes, once they are 
dependent on authorship for a livelihood. Writing 
history is a task of years, at least such history as 
proceeds out of original research. A novelist may 
live by his pen and often in considerable comfort, 
once he has made a name; but historians seldom 
acquire from their books any large returns. Most 
eminent historians have been men of fortune — Gib- 
bon, Freeman, Parkman, Macaulay, Prescott, Bancroft. 
They could literally observe the Horatian warning not 
to publish until " the ninth ripening moon." 

The business of writing books has not always 
been an outcome of high personal character. There 
have been great poets, successful novelists, and ac- 
complished essayists whose characters bore no impor- 
tant relation to their literary performances ; their 
characters often seemed, in fact, to belie their per- 
formances, making an understanding of their work 
difficult. But the men who have written memorable 
histories have almost invariably been men of distinct 
personal worth. We may recall the great list from 
Thucydides to Tacitus, from Clarendon to Hume, 

133 



134 0UR LITERARY DELUGE 

from Gibbon to Macaulay, from Motley to Prescott, 
from Parkman to Bancroft. Not a few historians 
have seemed greater than their works, the work only 
a partial manifestation of the man. All through 
their writings the man has been writ large. One 
sees laborious research, restraint in utterance, the 
repose of conscious strength ; now the action of 
power, now its silence. 

The nature of the historian's occupation is pri- 
marily laborious above all other literary effort. His 
work must be long-continued, must often be a life- 
work, and it is certain to receive no adequate pe- 
cuniary reward. The novelist, now and then, has 
reached modest independence, but there never lived 
a historian, save Macaulay, who could be said to 
have made much money by writing books. Histo- 
rians have spent the best part of their lives in getting 
ready to write. 

But if their personal demands are greater than 
those which writing fiction or verse or essays makes, 
the rewards, in fame at least, are as great, and com- 
monly are greater. This fame is of the best — the 
purest, most honestly and most disinterestedly won, 
the most free from any taint affecting its intrinsic 
worth. The fame of Thucydides rivals, if it does 
not overshadow, that of the warriors whose deeds he 
celebrated. Tacitus might well be indifferent to the 
empurpled despots who happened to rule the world 
while he was becoming an acknowledged master of 
the superb tongue of a noble race and a means for 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 1 35 

its preservation. Gibbon toiled while lesser men 
shone, that he might become the greatest of English- 
men who have written history. Parkman, the ac- 
complished narrator of events big with missionary 
as well as martial valor, earned his fame by the use 
of a style as matchless for picturesque and varied 
beauty as were those forests lands amid which his 
heroes toiled and won or toiled and perished. 

Among our latest historians is Captain Mahan. 
Of his volumes on " The Influence of Sea Power in 
History " I wish not here to speak, but of his later 
work on Nelson's life, wherein biography rises to the 
plane of history. Readers familiar with the earlier 
books must have approached the " Nelson " with a 
full sense of the spirit and mastery with which they 
had been written. Captain Mahan writes out of a full 
mind : he knows more than he records in detail. He 
has grasp of material, appreciation of essentials, 
knowledge of words, an understanding of the effects 
which words produce, regard for unity of structure, 
sense of proportion, an eye to the general outline of 
his completed fabric ; in a word, he is what all suc- 
cessful and serious historians have been and ever 
must be — an architect. When he sets about the 
erection of an edifice, his first and greatest care is to 
lay the foundations broad, deep, and firm, after com- 
plete knowledge of the superstructure to follow. He 
begins to build with regard for the nature of the 
structure to be observed of the public, for its fidelity 
to facts, its endurance, and its usefulness. 



136 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

The result has been a life of Nelson before which 
other lives give place. The private life is unfolded 
in what must be accepted as the final version, and 
the naval career presented with equal success as a 
finality. 

The Nelson literature already existing was like the 
Nelson monuments, numerous but of widely varied 
degrees of excellence, the most of them having slight 
value. Before Nelson died a life of him had ap- 
peared, and when he lay dead many hands set 
about writing others — those ill-conceived, ill-written 
lives, the burden of which the fame of every great 
man seems destined to endure. At least one of them 
was inspired by Lady Hamilton ; it had for its moving 
purpose, not the glory of Nelson, but the claims of 
the Lady herself upon the Treasury of England. 
The work by Clarke and McArthur has generally 
been classed as the best of them ; but it was weighted 
with a large quarto form and became a burden rather 
than a pleasure in a reader's hands. It was unques- 
tionably due to this fact that Southey's little work, 
long since regarded as a classic, met with a degree 
of acceptance that surprised its author, who was 
pinning his faith in permanent fame on a " History of 
Brazil " long since forgotten. 

Southey's work was drawn from Clarke and Mc- 
Arthur and was without merit as an original contri- 
bution, but it had supreme value in being brief, 
and as the work of an artist in writing English. It 
was so far wanting in originality that it embalmed 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 1 37 

erroneous statements for which Lady Hamilton and 
others are responsible. Unlike Weems's " Life of 
Washington," it had high literary value, and thus has 
secured for errors longer life than has been enjoyed 
by those of Weems. It was a hard task to demolish 
Weems ; but the task has virtually been accomplished. 
With Southey's book, however, the only recourse lies 
in carefully annotated and corrected editions, for 
Southey's book will probably live a longer time than 
anything else Southey ever wrote. 

The destruction of popular errors is about the 
most difficult work that can be undertaken in 
literature. The fiction of the paternal cherry tree 
which Weems created has been perhaps the most 
persistent error in the historical equipment of un- 
learned Americans. Weems was an itinerant preacher 
and peddler ; not essentially a man of false speech ; 
indeed a man of many good purposes. The lies he 
told about Washington are to be ascribed rather to 
want of historical sense than to any desire to indulge 
in misrepresentation. For the creation of the Nelson 
fictions we must seek other motives, and less excus- 
able ones; but their destruction has not been the 
more easy on that account. Aided by Lady Hamil- 
ton on the one hand and by Southey on the other, 
their persistent survival has imposed an almost insur- 
mountable task upon those who would make Nelson 
known as he was. 

It is remarkable how a man trained to a naval life 
and no longer young has risen to such heights as 



138 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Captain Mahan. We can see where leisure has 
been his for study, where his profession has made 
him competent to understand naval history ; but 
beyond all this remains something not clear. We can 
never define the means by which great books were 
written ; the personal equation, the thing we call 
talent or genius, is beyond our description. We can 
appreciate character and can value it properly, but 
we cannot readily understand its workings or its 
manifestations. 

The most interesting thing about Captain Mahan's 
books is something which the books do not tell us — 
the answer to the question : how he, a naval officer, 
turned to literature and acquitted himself in that field 
of conquest with so much honour. One fact we must 
assume : he has read great authors and learned to 
know whereof good historical writing consists. If he 
has not spent his days and nights with Addison, he 
has spent them with other masters. He has made 
no man's style his own, but has conformed to cer- 
tain fundamental qualities of which all good writ- 
ing consists — clearness, personality, variety, charm. 
Style unquestionably is the man, but a man may not 
have style in prose without education and experience ; 
he may not have it without knowing what it is, and 
he cannot master it until he has long practised it. 
The question remains unanswered, except in so far as 
a partial answer is found in character. 

Captain Mahan's naval career has raised him to 
honourable and even enviable rank ; but the times of 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 1 39 

peace in which mainly he has served gave him no op- 
portunity for acquiring those distinct honours of war 
which a brave man may rightly covet. Now that his 
name is securely linked with that of a hero who, if 
not flawless, is clearly the most attractive, as he was 
the most disinterested, in naval annals, he may well 
cultivate indifference to the fame which war with 
England made possible for Bainbridge and Perry and 
war among ourselves for Farragut. No fame can 
ever be comparable to genuine literary fame. Sailors 
and soldiers, statesmen and administrators, alike 
yield before it. It belongs neither to one nation nor 
to one epoch ; nor to one speech nor one race of men. 
The limits imposed upon it are such only as mark 
the dwelling-places of the human race in a civilized 
state. 

The reproach often made against American writers 
of biography, that they do not understand or, under- 
standing, do not use the art of condensation, perhaps 
never had better justification than the life of Garrison 
by his sons affords. At the start were published the 
first and second volumes, embracing thirty-five years 
of Garrison's life — really about fifteen years that 
could be said to bear some relation to public affairs. 
Those two volumes comprised about 1000 octavo 
pages, and in great part were printed in small 
type. They inspired a rather depressing view of 
the outlook, for we seemed quite certain to see two 
additional volumes ere the end should be reached, 
while there were natural grounds for fears that we 



140 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

might see three. Perhaps it was an occasion for 
thanks that the authors kept the story down to two 
additional volumes instead of making three. 

These two, however, make another thousand pages 
to add to the previous thousand. Now, 2000 pages 
are not read in a single sitting : they are not read 
thoroughly and with pleasure at a dozen sittings, 
especially when they relate to a single human 
career devoted to a cause that led to many other 
great careers. These 2000 pages are equivalent to 
two-thirds as many words as were found necessary 
by Edward Gibbon to record the story of "The 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Gibbon's 
work was really the history of the civilized world 
for more than twelve centuries, and it has survived 
to this day as not only the splendid bridge from the 
New World back to the Old, as some one (Byron, 
was it not?) called it, but as an adequate bridge, 
still competent to do its work and still in no danger 
and in no need of being superseded. 

Again, to take a more modern book, and one 
which may be said to have been written after ap- 
proved methods of our time, let Green's " History 
of the English People" be cited — the larger work, 
published in this country, in four volumes. Green 
began his narrative with the year 449, and he brought 
the history down to the battle of Waterloo, a period 
of more than thirteen centuries ; and yet Green's work 
actually contains fewer words than this biography of 
Garrison. With all respect for the filial devotion 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 141 

which has inspired the biography and for the liter- 
ary skill applied to its preparation, one must have 
a frank say again and pronounce the length to 
which it has been carried unreasonable and un- 
necessary. 

Edward L. Pierce's laborious researches in writing 
his life of Sumner carried him into every possible 
field, whether it were political, social, or personal. 
His extensive footnotes, with references to dates, 
pages, and names, bear strong witness to extraordi- 
nary accuracy and patience. It would not be just 
to say of the work, as Lowell said of Masson's " Life 
of Milton," that it is the history of a century, " in- 
terrupted now and then by an unexpected apparition 
of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes 
he does not intrude," for Mr. Pierce confines himself 
strictly to public questions in which Sumner bore 
a part. 

In these four volumes of 2400 pages, with four 
to six hundred words each, there are, in a rough 
estimate, about 1,200,000 words. This falls a little 
below the 1,500,000 words which Nicolay and Hay 
devoted to the life of Lincoln ; but it nearly equals 
the words which Bancroft bestowed upon the his- 
tory of the United States, which, roughly speak- 
ing, number 1,350,000. Mr. Pierce's work in no 
proper sense can be regarded as biography. More 
truly it should be called a repository of letters, de- 
scriptions, and details concerning political movements 
in which Sumner was a foremost figure. What one 



142 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

must admire, therefore, is the laborious devotion by 
which its preparation was made possible. Twenty 
years were consecrated to it, and no man ever had 
paid to his memory a nobler tribute of friendship. 

The Brooks assault, for example, is narrated in sixty- 
four pages, which means about 27,000 words, or almost 
as many as Southey used in writing his life of Nelson. 
Sumner's diary, kept during a visit to France, com- 
prises about 15,000 words. With all its magnificence 
as a simple performance, not to say a deed of 
friendship, these volumes are not biography. 

A still more notable example of biographies that 
are really histories is found in the " Life of Lincoln," 
by Messrs. Nicolay and Hay. Literature would 
probably be searched in vain for an enterprise in 
biography that could rival it in many of its phases. 
The volumes contain about 475 pages each, and the 
number of words in each, estimating roughly, is about 
150,000. For totals, therefore, we should have 
4750 printed pages and 1,500,000 written words, — 
a truly impressive contribution to the life-story of a 
single human being. 

It is interesting to print alongside such figures the 
corresponding ones for works in general history. 
Bancroft's work, independent of the section devoted 
to the Constitution, covering as it does the period 
from the discovery of America down to the close of 
the Revolution, corresponds very closely in length 
with this life of Lincoln, and it embraces an epoch 
of very nearly 300 years. The work of John 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 143 

Richard Green (the larger history is here referred 
to) contains an approximate total of 780,000 words. 
It embraces the whole period of England's known 
history, stretching from the year 449, when the 
Angles sailed away on that momentous voyage, down 
to the year 18 15, in which England's flag was the 
flag of victory at Waterloo. The history that Gibbon 
wrote contains about 1,215,000 words. It is the his- 
tory of the Roman Empire and of the rest of the 
known world (" the fairest part of the earth and the 
most civilized portion of mankind," were Gibbon's 
words), from the Antonine emperors down to the 
overthrow of the last Emperor of the East in 1453 — 
a period of more than twelve centuries. Hence we 
see that this life of Lincoln equals in length Ban- 
croft's work, and exceeds Gibbon's by 300,000 words 
and Green's by more than 700,000. 

From the date of Lincoln's nomination down to 
the time of his death was a period of four years 
and nine months. We have eight and one-half 
volumes, with 1,275,000 words, devoted to those four 
years and nine months of one man's life — vastly 
more than any writer has accorded to any four and 
three-quarters years of Washington or Cromwell, of 
Wellington or Napoleon — far more than Green has 
given to the English people for over thirteen hundred 
years and slightly more than Gibbon required. 

In any strict sense that work is not biography but 
history, or more properly material out of which history 
may be written. Eor a true life of Lincoln, at least 



144 0UR LITERARY DELUGE 

as a man, we must go to Herndon's book, begun more 
than thirty years ago. At first it was Mr. Herndon's 
intention to do no more than write a series of maga- 
zine articles, but he soon found that the matter easily 
expanded itself into many hundred pages. Finally 
the work saw the light in an unheralded and rather 
obscure fashion. It was published in Chicago, by 
a house not then extensively known, and in form 
and with title-page such as did not tend to promote 
public acquaintance. 

Readers of discernment saw its worth, and those 
who could best judge recognized what a flood of 
light it shed on Lincoln's life. To many it caused 
something of a shock. The freedom with which the 
skeletons in the Lincoln closet were publicly exposed 
was so unwelcome, and it disclosed so much that 
explained the profound melancholy of Lincoln, that 
the question easily arose whether or no Mr. Hern- 
don had really played the part of wise and faithful 
friend. 

Mr. Herndon's theory of the biographer's functions 
was to tell the whole truth and not a part of it. He 
was convinced of the durable principle that, in all 
biography, " at last the truth will come, and no 
man need hope to evade it." In Lincoln's case the 
full stock of facts was essential to a true knowledge 
of him. To understand him we must know him, and 
to appreciate the great part he played we must " take 
him as he was." Lincoln was unlike other self-made 
great men in our history; he "rose from a lower 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 145 

depth than any of them," and his origin "was in 
that unknown and sunless bog in which history 
never made a footprint." Mr. Herndon wrote solely 
with the purpose of keeping Lincoln in sight, all the 
time resolved to cling closely to his side. He had 
no theory of his life to maintain or overturn. 
Lincoln was his warm and devoted friend. " I 
always loved him, and I revere his name to this 
day," says he; and he is sure that God's naked 
truth can never injure Lincoln's fame, for "it will 
stand that or any other test." 

In an earlier time some memorable biographies 
that are histories were written on a much smaller 
scale. Not one man's life was chosen to represent 
an epoch, but the lives of many men. The lives of 
those painters which Vasari wrote, — what a storehouse 
of information and personal gossip does not the 
simple mention of them recall, and what days and 
nights of the most delightful reading in all the range 
of biographical writings, ancient or modern ? The 
extraordinary work done by the men of Florence in 
the great art period abounds in so many examples 
of prodigious individual creations that we perhaps 
ought not to be surprised at the fulness, the charm, 
and the supreme value of Vasari, to whom indeed 
the world will forever owe an unpaid debt. The great 
wonder should be that Vasari remained untranslated 
into our tongue down to 1850, when Mrs. Jonathan 
Foster undertook that task, and performed it so well 
that the newer editions have followed her text. 



I46 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

The fame that has come to Vasari, could he 
contemplate it now, would astonish him. His dear- 
est ambition lay, not in success as a biographer, 
— a work he took up only " for love of these, our 
artists," — but as a painter and an architect, in 
which vocations he had much contemporary fame. 
The period he lived in was subsequent to the peri- 
ods he wrote about. Throughout Italy, save .in 
Venice, painting had then entered upon its decline. 
Michaelangelo, alone, of the great Florentines, re- 
mained. In Venice, Titian and Sansovino, though 
old, were still active. Paul Veronese and Tinto- 
retto, however, were young. At Bologna flourished 
in its splendour the degenerate school that bears 
that town's name. Everywhere, save in Venice, 
was degeneracy. Great art had been late to rise 
in Venice. Even there it was tainted with the 
beauty worship which elsewhere attended its decline. 

Vasari as an artist was wanting in originality. 
He lay under the dominion of greater men who 
had gone before him. He probably did not know 
this, and while absorbed in extraordinary industry 
and contemporary success, he doubtless fancied that 
his name, as well as Raphael's and Del Sarto's, 
would live. Partly because of this satisfaction, 
partly because of a sincere worship of the work 
done by greater men, Vasari was admirably fitted 
to collect and write down the biographical records 
he has left us. Certainly in his nature were com- 
pounded many qualities which go to form the ideal 



„ BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 147 

annalist, — enthusiasm for his work, painstaking 
care in gathering material, an abounding love of 
greatness, in which there was never a trace of 
jealousy, and real genius for putting life and colour 
into what he wrote. 

His latest editors 1 have rightly described him as 
a man with filial reverence and even tenderness 
for great masters, and they unqualifiedly accord 
him the honour that is his rightful possession as a 
writer in whom the Florence of his time has been 
made to live forever. These personal qualities applied 
to art rendered his work barren, but applied to writ- 
ing, made it immensely valuable. He could gather 
information diligently, and he had enough art feel- 
ing to write artistically. It was a strange fate which 
made Vasari not only the biographer of the Florentine 
artists, but the architect of the building in which are 
housed so many hundreds of their greatest works 
— the Uffizi Palace and that long passageway which 
connects the Uffizi with that other noble shelter of 
art across the Arno. It was fit that Vasari should 
thus be linked closely with the great period he pro- 
foundly loved. 

Vasari's chronicles are much more than simple 
chronicles. They preserve for us in a hundred 
anecdotes and a hundred folk-sayings the very life 
and spirit of Florence. It was here that his artis- 
tic sense served both himself and posterity. Vasari 

1 E. H. and E. W. Blashfield and A. A. Hopkins, who have edited 
and annotated sixty of the lives " in the light of recent discoveries." 



148 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

wrote with his eye solely on Tuscany, Florence, 
Rome, and Venice. He had no conception that 
men in vast countries to the north of Italy, and 
greater ones across the Atlantic which Columbus 
had found seventy-five years before he wrote, 
would ever read his book, laud his name, and neg- 
lect his pictures. 

Quarrels and captiousness were not in him. He 
had prodigious vitality, but it found expression in 
work, not in quarrels or in vice. His was a blame- 
less life. Vasari loved the very paving-stones of 
Florence. We can see in his pages the streets 
where events occurred, their squares and corners, 
as well as the splendours of Lorenzo's court and 
Cosimo's, the religious pageantry, and all the 
varied aspects of that strong and tumultuous life 
upon which the battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio, 
the walls of Arnolfo, the dome of Brunelleschi, 
and the tower of Giotto looked calmly down. 

Great among states was that little Florentine 
Republic. With a population of perhaps 90,000 
souls, she gave to mankind a longer and a greater 
list of fair names than any other of the smaller 
cities the world has known save Athens. In her 
best time she might fitly be likened for art to 
the older city in the time of Pericles, and for 
patriotism, to the Rome of the Scipios. But 
Florence was also great in ways that are material. 
Her trade was large and profitable. In her 
manufactures she was prominent among European 



BIOGRAPHIES THAT ARE HISTORIES 1 49 

cities. Her revenues at one time were greater than 
those of England under Elizabeth. Crushed as her 
republican spirit often was, until, under the forms of 
a republic, there existed tyranny, Florence was a 
city in which greatness had been achieved, not so 
much by a state as by individuals. Indeed, intense 
individuality lay at the beginning of all Florentine 
achievements. But it was combined with a com- 
mon love of the state that was unsurpassed among 
Italian cities, save perhaps in Venice. Hence the 
worth of Vasari among biographers who have 
become historians. 



IV 

FASHIONS IN COLLECTING 

Fashions change in books as in most other things 
that are products of men's hands. It is only in prim- 
itive nature that they do not change — the blue sky, 
the primeval forest, the winding river, the ocean 
shore. These remain, and with them forever their 
charm. It is when men utilize the products of nature 
that fashion enters. In one age it is the tulip that 
fashion exalts ; in another, the orchid ; in another, 
some particular rose. 

And so with books. The fancies of one age are 
not those of another. Dibdin's heroes and the 
mighty men revered of Burton pursued prizes which 
the collectors of to-day neglect. More and more 
have first editions of English authors advanced in 
esteem, while specimens of printing and the classics 
of antiquity have declined. This is probably more 
true in this country than in England ; and here the 
change first set in ; but it is now making its sure 
way in the older land also. 

Some fifteenth-century books sold in London a few 
years ago show startling declines. Many of them 
had been purchased at prices which led apprais- 
ers to fix upon the whole collection a valuation of 

150 



FASHIONS IN COLLECTING 15 1 

$150,000. But they were disposed of at something 
under $30,000. For fifteenth-century books there no 
longer exists the demand that once existed. Speci- 
mens of early printing and first editions of Greek 
and Latin classics do not tempt the collector to the 
same extent that other books tempt him. In first 
editions he cares more for English authors than for 
Roman, more for American than for Greek. This 
explains why a New Testament manuscript of the 
fourteenth century, that had been valued at $225, 
was knocked down for $50. It also explains why a 
copy of the Kilmarnock Burns in the original blue 
paper wrapper has brought more than $2800. 

American collectors probably first learned at the 
Brinley sale how steadily this change in fashion had 
set in with their countrymen. Meanwhile, bibliomania 
in England continued to be chiefly concerned with 
early and scarce English and Continental books, and 
with specimens of printing, first editions of the 
Latin and Greek authors being a marked feature of 
it ; and so the contrast continued for long years after 
the Brinley sale. Certain works which aroused keen 
interest there failed to bring high prices here. 
Striking instances of this were seen. Volumes of 
surpassing rarity, widely known and esteemed among 
bibliographers, went for mere songs. Elzevirs, Bas- 
kervilles, and Alduses of undoubted genuineness sold 
at prices absurdly low. Early commentaries that are 
landmarks in classical scholarship brought little more 
than it costs to bind a single volume worthily and well. 



152 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Twenty years ago there was sold in New York a 
collection of the European type. A large sum had 
been laid out in bringing it together. Two years 
were devoted to making the catalogue — a catalogue 
the equal of which probably was never made before 
in America, not only in respect to typographical brill- 
iancy but in bibliographical skill and knowledge of 
books on the part of the compiler. When the sale 
began few ready purchasers were found, and the 
prices were surprisingly low. 

In this country it is early, choice, or curious edi- 
tions of standard modern authors that fetch large 
sums. American collectors in these fields outdo the 
foreigner. Many a precious English volume — a 
Kilmarnock Burns, an early Tennyson, or a scarce 
and extra-illustrated Byron — has found its way to 
New York in defiance of sharp English competition. 
London newspapers have made frequent note and 
offered pointed warnings against the growing Ameri- 
can demand. 

It is not so very many years since it was true that 
several of the highest prices paid in the country 
were secured for what are called extra-illustrated 
books, in which hundreds of plates, many of them 
rare and costly, had been inserted. But this sort of 
book embellishment has gone into deserved decline. 
It is a fashion true book lovers are glad to see 
go out. In order to make these books it was neces- 
sary to mutilate, or destroy altogether, many other 
books. It was a barbarous custom, unworthy of any 



FASHIONS IN COLLECTING 1 53 

one who truly loved books. For a copy of Irving' s 
" Washington," extended in this manner to ten vol- 
umes, with 1 100 plates, the sum of $2000 was paid 
in 1886. The same work would now sell for less. 
Francis's " Old New York " once sold for even more; 
but this book had 2500 plates inserted. In the auc- 
tion room to-day it would awaken moderate interest. 

Collectors who brought these books together were 
in truth vandals, or rather they were like the early 
popes and princes of Italy, by whom, and not by the 
Vandals, were destroyed the architectural monuments 
of Rome. Later in origin than the Grangerites has 
grown up another class of collectors, whose day, let 
us hope, may soon be over, — the collector who 
abstracts owners' plates from books. It is possible 
to understand stamp collecting and to see the utility 
of it — especially for the young, who need knowledge 
of states and geography ; or the Grangerite, for he 
produces unique and curious copies of books ; or the 
Bowdlerizer, for he aims to do public morality some 
service. But what benefit to his own mind or to the 
minds of others can the book-plate collector hope to 
accomplish through the pastime of extracting plates 
from books and mounting them elsewhere ? True, 
he might do a few worse things, but he might also 
engage in very many that would be better. We have 
long feared the ravages he would ultimately inflict. 
Here is a record from " Literature " of his work in 
London that confirms the worst fears : — 

" The most deadly modern enemy of the London 



154 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

stall is undoubtedly the growing cult of book-plate 
collecting. Thousands of octavos and duodecimos — 
the little eighteenth-century classics, bound in calf — 
series like the Tattler and Spectator, and books like 
Thomson's ' Seasons,' with Westall's plates, which 
used formerly to drift to the barrow, are now de- 
stroyed for the book-plates they contain. There is a 
dealer's shop within sound of St. Paul's, where any 
day one may see numbers of these innocents mas- 
sacred merely for their armorial plates, and it is ques- 
tionable whether even Grangerizing led to the ruin 
of a larger number of books than the now flourishing 
hobby of the book-plate collector." 

Moral suasion alone can be invoked to arrest the 
growth of this practice. Editors may denounce the 
culprits, preachers may appeal to their better nature, 
the conscience of the book world may be invoked 
to stay their hands. The time has indeed come when 
the cause should enlist supporters. What, after all, 
can be the charm of this vice? Why should any 
human being possessing a book that once was Wash- 
ington's, or Paul Revere's, or Byron's, deliberately 
separate the plate from the book, thus lessening the 
interest, and, I should think, the value, of both ? 
Compared with this pursuit, collecting door-plates 
would seem to be honourable, and collecting coffin- 
plates understandable. 

Observing persons who have noted changes in 
book-collecting fashions long since were impressed 
by the growing popularity of first editions of authors 



FASHIONS IN COLLECTING 155 

who wrote in the English tongue. The books which 
Heber and Huth gathered together, — by Heber sev- 
eral houses full, — and whose praises Dibdin sounded 
in many stately tomes, awaken less and less enthu- 
siasm when shown in private libraries, less and less 
breathless suspense when exposed in the pulpit of 
the auction room. The era of favourite English 
authors in first editions seems destined long to re- 
main. Never again will a Valdarfer Boccaccio find 
a Dibdin to celebrate its sale ; nor will its sale again 
found a club. 

In this country the change which began with col- 
lectors who hunted for Americana was extended 
afterward to Hawthorne and Longfellow — to " Fan- 
shawe," "Grandfather's Chair," "Voices of the 
Night," and " Coplas." Then it naturally expanded 
to others, and with these came the favourite authors 
of England. Having embraced Thackeray and Dick- 
ens, it went backward to the Elizabethan writers and 
the writers of Commonwealth and Restoration times. 
As Mr. Foote led in one advance, so was Mr. Ives 
chief among pursuers in the other. 

In the Arnold sale, where Milton's " Paradise Lost " 
brought $830, we saw to what heights Americans 
had carried the craze. In the sale about the same 
time, in London, of Walton's " Angler " for more 
than $2000, we saw where it had landed our Eng- 
lish cousins. Each book had advanced enormously 
in market value within a generation. Walton's book 
thirty years ago was worth only about $150 — then 



156 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

thought to be a great price, as indeed it relatively 
was. 

It is improbable that we have reached a limit in 
the value of such books. With the advance of time 
they are likely to grow more scarce rather than more 
common. Such copies as come to light will be offset 
by copies that pass out of the market and into public 
or private collections. What would advance values 
more than these facts, would be the offering of copies 
in more perfect condition than previous ones. Any 
sought-for classic, when found in spotless condition, 
may always be depended upon to fetch more than 
an imperfect copy ; to fetch double would be no 
uncommon result. Fielding's "Tom Jones," for ex- 
ample, in the original boards, has sold for three 
times the sum paid for the same edition in diamond 
calf when the edges of the leaves had been trimmed 
down by the binder. 

It is not alone sufficient that a book shall be fa- 
mous ; mere fame will not make a first edition worth 
any large sum. Besides being famous, the book must 
also be rare. Hawthorne's " Fanshawe " has slight 
fame — hardly more than the fame which the author's 
name gives it, for it has small worth as literature, and 
Hawthorne did his best to suppress it. The fame of 
" The Scarlet Letter," meanwhile, is wide ; but in 
the auction room " Fanshawe " would probably fetch 
twenty times what " The Scarlet Letter " would bring. 
There has never been any. great price realized for 
" Childe Harold," because the edition was large and 



FASHIONS IN COLLECTING 1 57 

copies are common; but Byron's "Hours of Idle- 
ness " or his " English Bards " is sure of a good price 
any day. To this rule there would seem to be some 
exception in the case of Thackeray and Dickens, but 
there has lately been a decided recession in the 
Thackeray and Dickens wave of enthusiasm, and col- 
lectors now demand copies in the original paper 
covers, advertisements and all included in the de- 
mand. 

An interesting phase of collecting is the care 
devoted to newer authors — to Andrew Lang, to 
Kipling, to Stevenson, for aught one knows to Barrie 
and Maclaren, the cause of which would seem to 
he in a faith that the fame of these writers will grow 
with time and their books become more and more 
sought after in first editions. But the books of these 
writers in most cases were published in large edi- 
tions. Kipling's first books, however, appeared in 
India, and are very scarce already, and one or two of 
Stevenson's are difficult to obtain ; but for their later 
works the future would seem to hold forth no great 
allurement. 

A special type of bibliomania in this country 
relates to Americana, and rightly so. Here are 
shown industry and enthusiasm quite equal to any 
ever shown in Europe in the bravest days of old for 
Aldine classics, early commentaries, or fifteenth-cen- 
tury printed books. Fine examples of the fact were 
seen in the Brinley sale. - Eliot Bibles are not prop- 
erly rare books, — not in the highest sense of the 



158 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

word " rare." Almost every important collection of 
Americana has a copy ; Mr. Brinley had seven, be- 
sides a copy of the New Testament printed two 
years before the Bible, and yet they fetch from $400 
to $1000 each. Of many books by the Mathers this 
is measurably true also, and so of the rarest produc- 
tions of the Franklin, Zenger, and Bradford presses. 
Where Dolet's Commentary and beautiful specimens 
of printing would go begging for better offers than 
$10 — or perhaps not as much as that — these 
American books find a ready sale at $100, $200, and 
$500. Some years ago a gentleman from Brooklyn 
purchased in a London book-store, for $5, a copy of 
the Eliot Bible. It was one of only twenty-five cop- 
ies printed, having the dedication to King Charles II., 
and of which a copy sold at the Brinley sale for 
just $1000. An Eliot Bible was picked up in 
Nassau Street some years ago for $50. It was sold 
afterward to a collector for $400. The collector 
paid $125 for having it cleaned and bound, and sold 
it again for $900. 

Coincident with these changes has come a change 
in second-hand book selling. The lamentations of 
the old-time dealer have been spoken with frequency 
and not without pathos. The change is as marked 
as it seems likely to be permanent. Beginning 
among what may be called the more modest grades 
of the trade, it has extended upward to the finer shops. 
Not only has the subject risen to the dignity of treat- 
ment in one of the great monthly magazines of Lon- 



FASHIONS IN COLLECTING 159 

don, but reports about it have been printed from 
provincial English centres. The story scarcely varies 
in general tone, whatever be the town it comes 
from. Everywhere has the second-hand trade been 
bad — in Sheffield, in Dundee, in Leeds, in Dublin. 

In our own land much the same conditions prevail, 
and from similar causes. A tour of Nassau or Canal 
Street will not disclose the same number of shops 
that once were found there. Book-shops still exist 
in those thoroughfares, but the character of their trade 
has changed. The chances of finding a rare volume 
on the sidewalk are now extremely few. This has 
resulted directly from an increase in collecting and 
in knowledge of rare books. More and more have 
the uptown shops and the auction rooms become 
places where collectors go to find rare and first 
editions. Before the pursuit had risen to the present 
proportions these books were rarely found in New 
York above the City Hall, save at small second-hand 
dealers' shops in dark basements on Canal Street 
and lower Fourth and Sixth avenues. Now they 
are found in the best stores, where are maintained 
thriving departments devoted to these books, and 
whence are issued special catalogues of them. 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS 

Few persons will believe that the buying of old 
books is a profitable undertaking. Common opinion 
sets it down as an easy and agreeable way for a rich 
man to spend superfluous income, or a poor one to 
make way with earnings which ought to go into a 
savings bank. If made with proper diligence and 
discrimination, a library of rare books may become 
as good an investment as an elevator filled with corn 
or a cellar packed with old wine. 

When the Menzies collection of Americana was 
sold, about twenty-five years ago, this fact was 
forcibly impressed upon collectors. It was an open 
secret that the library had brought double what it 
cost, Americana having appreciated wonderfully in 
value. The books sold for $48,000, a small sum 
indeed compared to what libraries have since been 
sold for. 1 

1 By occupation Mr. Menzies was a lumber merchant. One day a 
customer who had called at his house was kept waiting in the parlour, 
where he found on the table Mr. Menzies' most recent purchase — a 
scarce treasure in faultless condition, the tops of the leaves still uncut. 
Finding the leaves an obstruction in examining the book, this man of 
trade proceeded to tear them open with his forefinger, leaving ragged 
edges and seriously damaging the value of the book. When Mr. 

160 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS l6l 

Later came the sale of the Brinley collection, 
which realized $127,000: it had not cost Mr. Brin- 
ley anywhere near that sum. Many volumes which 
sold for large prices he had been able, through rare 
industry and thorough knowledge, to pick up for 
trifles. Stories of his goings about among ancient 
New England farm-houses and the dusky book- 
stalls of Boston and New York were many and 
quaint. Had he left a diary of these bibliographi- 
cal tours, it would have furnished most entertaining 
reading. Mr. Brinley collected books before the 
prospective value of Americana had been foreseen. 
He often obtained permission in farm-houses to see 
" any old books " that might be stored away in chests 
and barrels, in barns and garrets. For small sums 
or by an exchange for modern popular authors, he 
many times secured treasures literally worth their 
weight in gold. 

This is the most remarkable American library ever 
sold in this country. In the matter of price the 
next highest total was obtained for the Brayton Ives 
collection, which fetched $124,235. Mr. Ives is the 
well-known banker of New York, and has been presi- 
dent of the Stock Exchange. The average for single 
works in the Ives collection was much higher than 
in the Brinley sale, being $107.75 as against $13.38. 
In fact, the Ives average is the highest that any 

Menzies was afterward telling this story to a friend, he was asked, 
" Did you ever charge your customer with that book in your bill ? " 
To which he replied, " Many times." 

M 



1 62 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

collection has ever secured at auction in New York. 
Mr. Ives's library, therefore, in uniform choiceness 
might be called the finest ever sold here. But it 
may be doubted if his collection, were it now to be 
sold again (it was first sold in 1891), would show the 
same advance that the Brinley collection would 
show. Competent judges have estimated that the 
Brinley books, were they sold to-day, would bring 
somewhere near $250,000 dollars. But this would 
still leave the high average maintained by Mr. Ives's 
collection intact. 

Would a man buy books on which his heirs may 
reap a substantial profit, let him buy Americana. 
They are as certain to rise in value as is any sort of 
possession a man can have. When the Deane 
books were sold in Boston a few years ago, they 
brought several thousand dollars more than they 
would have brought when Mr. Deane died. Of all 
American libraries, the greatest in the country 
is owned in Providence. It was gathered many years 
ago by John Carter Brown, when Americana were 
not costly. Its auction value to-day has been placed 
as high as $1,000,000, and it might even sell for 
$250,000 more. These figures made me once remark 
to a bibliographer that it must be the most valuable 
collection in the country. " Oh, no," said he, " there 
is one more valuable, and it is owned here in New 
York." But that collection is not so specially devoted 
to Americana. It is owned by Robert Hoe. 

Among Americana the most costly book sold in 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS 163 

America at auction is the first edition of the " Letter 
of Columbus," published in Rome in 1493 — one of 
the smallest of Americana extant, comprising as it 
does only four leaves of thirty-four lines to the page. 
Only five copies are known, and for one of these in 
1890 the sum of $2900 was paid in New York. A 
book of much higher price, however, is Hariot's 
"Virginia " (1588), which is so rare that no copy has 
been sold at auction in nearly a century. The only 
perfect copy known is now in a private library. The 
owneris understood to have paid for it in the neighbour- 
hood of $4000. Another extremely rare American book 
is " The Bay Psalm Book " of 1640. Only two copies 
have been sold in this country. One of them in 1875 
brought $1025; the other in 1879, $1200, the purchaser 
in the latter case being Cornelius Vanderbilt. Put 
up at auction to-day " The Bay Psalm Book " would 
bring far more than either of these prices. Good 
judges estimate its value at about $5000. 

Mr. Arnold's recent sales have forcibly shown 
what profits may still be made in collecting when 
good judgment is brought to the pursuit. He began 
to collect long after the demand for first editions 
of modern authors had become keen, and when 
many cautious souls believed the days of bargains 
had forever gone by. Mr. Arnold's copy of Haw- 
thorne's " Fanshawe " cost him $200, and he sold it 
for $410 j 1 his copy of Goldsmith's " Deserted Vil- 

1 It may be proper to add here that some twenty years ago a copy 
of Hawthorne's first book in the original edition, bound in boards, 



1 64 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

lage," $33-33, and he sold it for $190; the original 
manuscript of Emerson's "Threnody," $26.40, and it 
sold for $300; a copy of Chapman's " Homer," with 
notes by Coleridge, $110, and he sold it for $635; 
the proof sheets of Browning's " Ring and the 
Book," with corrections, $72.88, and it sold for 
$680; a presentation copy of Keats's poems, $71, and 
it realized $500 ; a copy of Milton's " Paradise 
Lost," $200, and it sold for $830; a copy of 
Shelley's " Adonais," in the original covers, $150, 
and he sold it for $510. 

Not many years ago there was sold in Boston a 
shabby old book called " Cushman's Sermon," of 
which only five copies were known to exist It had 
never before turned up in an auction room, and it 
brought $1000. Old sermons are not commonly 
regarded as literature. They are seldom interesting 
to read. Nor is the name of Cushman famous 
among writers of books. Why, then, this value ? 
Cushman's sermon happens to be the first New 
England sermon that ever got into print. This 

was acquired by me for a very small sum. In one of the auction 
rooms, tied up with a bit of clothesline, appeared a collection of about 
thirty old American books, chiefly of the period I 820-1840. which were 
to be sold as one lot. By accident I discovered on the back of one 
of them the name " Fanshawe," and made a bid for the entire lot at so 
much per volume, the total cost to me being about $3. After the sale, 
I removed the " Fanshawe " and had the remainder subsequently sold 
for $1.50. This copy of " Fanshawe " a few years later, in an unguarded 
moment, I parted with for about $50. It was in excellent condition, 
quite as good, it seems from the description, as Mr. Arnold's copy, 
which brought $410. 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS 165 

fact and the excessive rarity of copies explain the 
price. 

The romances of book auction rooms indeed would 
make a pretty volume, should some one gather and 
narrate them well. Along with this Cushman sale 
would go another, of which reports came at the same 
time, — Fitzgerald's version of " Omar Khayyam." 
Originally published in London, it fell as flat as ever 
book fell. Some 200 copies long lay on a shelf 
unsalable, and even when offered at one penny per 
copy the sale was slow. But in 1898, nearly forty 
years afterward, Bernard Quaritch, the original pub- 
lisher, when seeking a copy of that first edition had 
to pay $105 for it at auction. A still higher price 
would have to be paid now — probably $300. 

One of the choicest private collections ever made 
in England was that of Thomas Grenville, who 
lived to be ninety-six years of age, and devoted the 
last forty years of his life to making it. It comprises 
about 20,000 volumes, and is believed to have cost 
him all of $270,000. Had it been sold at public auc- 
tion, more than that would have been realized for it ; 
it is one of the standing regrets of collectors that 
these books never came to the block. In 1845, a 
year before he died, Grenville gave them in his will 
to the British Museum, of which it still forms one of 
the brightest ornaments. When the Perkins collec- 
tion, comprising only 865 lots, was sold in London, in 
1873, it brought $130,000 — an average of more than 
$150 per lot. A copy of the Gutenberg, or Mazarin, 



1 66 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Bible, on vellum, sold for $17,000, and another copy, 
on paper, for $13,450 — very handsome advance on 
the original purchase price. 

But the collector must buy with discrimination. In 
the number and variety of its volumes, probably no 
private collection ever surpassed that of Richard 
Heber, brother of the Bishop. It was a miscella- 
neous collection in every department of literature, 
and had been purchased with little regard to cost. 
Heber had mere book hunger, in which taste and 
judgment had subordinate place. He is believed 
to have possessed in all 110,000 volumes, 30,000 of 
which he acquired at a single purchase He had eight 
houses filled with books, — two in London, two in the 
country, and one each in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and 
Ghent, besides smaller collections elsewhere. When 
sold, in 1834, the books fetched $285,000, which was 
a little more than half what they had cost. 

In striking contrast with Heber's methods stand 
the methods of Bertram, Earl of Ashburnham, 
whose collection was sold in London, only a few 
years ago, for a sum in excess of $300,000. This 
represented a profit, and, in the case of many books, 
very large ones. The Earl of Ashburnham in the 
main knew what to buy — what books collectors 
wanted or were likely to want. In a word, he had 
the same foresight that is shown by men who make 
money from other investments. He knew how to 
buy cheaply the things which would eventually be 
worth more. It is with books as with lands, stocks, 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS 1 67 

bonds, and merchandise. To make a profit one must 
buy what can be sold for more than one pays. 

The only collection of books ever sold at auction 
for a larger sum than the Ashburnham collection 
was the Beckford library, gathered originally by 
the author of " Vathek," that brilliant Englishman, 
son of an alderman in London, who, in dying, made 
William Beckford " England's wealthiest son." 
Beckford was the builder of the famous Gothic pile 
called Fonthill Abbey, which had an enormous tower, 
that fell of its own weight while in process of con- 
struction. 

Lord Ashburnham was a late survivor of those 
noblemen who, in the early years of this century, 
strove with each other in the book-shops and 
auction rooms. Dibdin chronicled their exploits, 
Dr. Ferriar sang their praises, voicing the delights 
their pastime afforded. Chief among their combats 
was the sale of the Valdarfer Boccaccio. Another 
event was the founding of the Roxburghe club ; a relic 
of that club still surviving is the binding to which it 
gave a name. Great among the greatest of those 
mighty book hunters was Lord Spencer. All their 
passions for books, all their tastes and judgment, 
were inherited by Lord Ashburnham. 

Lord Ashburnham collected through life. The 
passion had indeed been born in him while a boy 
at school, and it lasted until he died. Not in any 
fine additions to his ancient home, in pictures 
gathered, in political leadership, in aristocratic sport, 



1 68 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

was fame sought, or the duty of his rank observed ; 
but in collecting books. It is common testimony 
that he brought to this pursuit sound judgment, 
unerring taste, and unwearied patience — that great- 
est, as it is the rarest, quality in any collector, 
whether of books or money. All his life he had 
sought in vain for a perfect and clean copy of the 
Wycliffe Bible in manuscript, and one of the very 
last books he bought was a copy of that work. 
Anecdotes of his conquests multiplied after his 
death. He once bought at a Pall Mall shop for 
;£6oo three books afterward disposed of for great 
sums : one privately for ,£3000, another at auction 
for ^1500, and the third at auction for ^1000 — in 
all, $27,500 for books that cost $3000. 

Lord Ashburnham, when he had given an order 
to an agent to buy a certain book, meant that no 
limit was imposed ; the book was to be bought, 
whatever the price : his wrath was certain to de- 
scend upon the head of a man who failed to remember 
this fact. He once gave a commission to buy a second 
folio Shakespeare, a clean copy in the original bind- 
ing. Second folios were not then in much demand 
and were estimated in value at about .£15. His 
agent kept bidding until the price ran to £60, when 
he dared not go any further and lost the book, to the 
Earl's lasting displeasure. Years afterward this in- 
cident was recalled in proof of the Earl's foresight. 
That copy of the second folio sold in 1864 for £146, 
and again, in 1896, for ,£540. 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS 1 69 

But here we are to remember that not only the 
value of books, but values in all things, have enor- 
mously advanced since Lord Ashburnham's time. 
His were among the rarest of all books, and no 
library of first editions, proportionately so extensive 
and choice, had before come to that pulpit over 
which sways the hammer of the auctioneer. 

Supreme among rare books has been one for 
which in our time has been paid the highest price a 
book ever sold for at auction, the Gutenberg Bible. 
It has made a record for all countries. A noble 
copy was sold in London a few years ago for about 
$20,000. This sum is in excess of any price yet paid 
for the work in this country, but this in part is due 
to the superior condition and character of the copy 
sold in London. In the Brinley sale of 1880, a copy 
brought $8000. Eleven years afterward it was put 
up in the Ives sale, when it brought $14,800. 

Most specimens of early printing have fallen some- 
what in price. The exceptions are the rarest and 
finest specimens, as well as those which are first 
editions of ancient authors. It is remarkable how 
few essential changes have been made in the art of 
printing since those early specimens were produced. 
The steam engine has vastly increased the rapidity 
with which impressions are made, but the methods 
now in use for the work of setting up and arranging 
type are practically the same as those employed at 
Mentz, Strasburg, and Venice four centuries ago. 
Alongside this curious fact exists the no less remark- 



170 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

able one that books printed by Gutenberg and the 
Alduses were typographically the equals of the best 
that have ever been made since. Persons who have 
seen a page of Gutenberg's Bible must have been 
impressed with the truth of this. It may be said 
that there is not a printer in the world to-day who 
could make a handsomer page. Lovers of old books 
maintain, indeed, that this is not only the first book 
ever printed with movable types, but that it is the 
most perfect. 

There were many causes that led to this perfec- 
tion, chief among them the character of the men 
who, in the fifteenth century, were printers. They 
were scholars, and were commonly esteemed members 
of a learned profession. Master printers, as a rule, 
were acquainted with the Latin language. In many 
cases they were at the head of a band of educated 
and enlightened men, who recognized them as 
patrons of learning. Eminent scholars were proud 
to add their presence to the glory of the establish- 
ment of the elder Aldus, by becoming correctors 
for his press ; they even acted as compositors. 

At Paris, the printer Robert Estienne on a cer- 
tain occasion was able to entertain in his own house 
ten of the wisest men of his time. He was himself 
the author of many books that came from his press, 
— some of them books of the greatest value that he 
published, — and in knowledge of Latin, Greek, and 
Hebrew few contemporaries surpassed him. We are 
told that the Latin tongue was spoken familiarly, not 



PROFITS IN RARE BOOKS I /I 

only by himself and his friends, but by his wife and 
children. Many enlightened printers have been 
known in this century who separated their art from 
its commercial side and produced noble work; but 
eminent scholars, with a keen sense of beauty and 
proportion in type as well as in writing, have not 
been associated with them as correctors of the press 
in the sense that they were with Aldus and his con- 
temporaries. 



VI 

PARKMAN AND SOME OF HIS "SOURCES" 

Parkman, Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Irving: these 
are the historians of past generations in this country 
whose writings may be said to remain potent still. 
Various have been their fortunes. Motley and Irving 
have been the most popular, but Bancroft won the 
earliest and highest fame. Parkman rose to his 
eminence slowly ; indeed, he scarcely came into his 
own until old age had gathered round him, but chief 
among them all stands Parkman now. Bancroft 
seems already to have been threatened with being 
superseded, or at least with remaining no longer 
essential. Among all the historians who have 
written in English, where, in fact, save to Gibbon, 
shall we look for a superior to Parkman, in origi- 
nality of research, accuracy of statement, and charm 
of style ? Surely not to Macaulay, with his brilliant 
fragment steeped in partisanship ; not to Hume, with 
his chronic indifference to facts ; not to Green ; not 
to Stubbs ; nor to Freeman or Froude. 

The biography of Parkman has directed the world's 
attention once more to the extraordinary difficulties 
under which Parkman accomplished his work. With 
eyes so weak that he was virtually unable to use 

172 



PARKMAN AND SOME OF HIS "SOURCES" 1 73 

them at all in reading, and with other physical ail- 
ments, which for long periods unfitted him for any 
kind of intellectual work, he was able in the course 
of a long life to add to American literature its noblest 
monument among historical writings. How he ac- 
complished so much, it may be doubted if any one 
will ever be able fully to understand. The more one 
reads his books and discovers the patient research 
on which they are based, the more this marvel 
grows. 

Parkman entered a field of historical inquiry in- 
vaded by no one before his time. It was absolutely 
virgin soil. He constructed his narrative out of 
records stored away in the archives of families and 
states, foreign as well as American. His field was 
not only virgin soil, but of vast importance to any 
understanding of the history of America. For more 
than a hundred years a conflict was in progress here 
between forces which made for Anglo-Saxon civiliza- 
tion on the one hand, and for French on the other ; 
between what we owe to Magna Charta, the Bill of 
Rights, and trial by jury, and what Latin races have 
preserved from the laws of Rome. 

That conflict began with fur traders. It was con- 
tinued by missionaries, — in the first instance, Jesuits ; 
in the next, Episcopalians and Presbyterians. It in- 
volves the story of Frontenac, the siege of Louisbourg, 
the battle of Lake George, and the victory of Wolfe. 
It did not completely end until, at Detroit, only a few 
years before rebellion became rife in New York and 



1/4 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Boston harbours, the conspiracy of Pontiac was 
crushed out. By these events was worked out the 
problem whether in North America men should 
speak the language of Shakespeare or the tongue 
of Voltaire. That moving chronicle makes up the 
eleven volumes of Parkman's History. 

His books are unrivalled among histories as books 
of the finest romance. The events he chronicled 
happened on frontiers ; often at mere trading posts ; 
sometimes on the shores of lakes, where no one dwelt 
except savages ; again in the dense forest, as at Great 
Meadows, where Washington won his spurs as a 
soldier, and where, in the death of Jumonville, was 
fired the shot which, as Parkman says, "set the 
world on fire." No volumes have been written by 
any historian which Americans ought to read with 
more absorbing interest, or with minds more com- 
pletely charmed. 

It is not merely the theme which produces all this ; 
not the savage martyrdom of Father Jogues, not the 
tales Bressani told, not the expedition of Pepperell, 
not Wolfe, wishing rather than to win the morrow's 
battle that he might have been the author of Gray's 
" Elegy" — that memorable scene on that momentous 
night before he scaled the heights of Quebec to win 
a renown that surely ought to last as well as Gray's. 
Parkman's style accounts measurably for the charm 
of all his books. While he has the restraint that be- 
fits the man of learning, he has elevation of style and 
picturesqueness. In the student and man of letters 



PARKMAN AND SOME OF HIS "SOURCES" 1 75 

we see the accomplished artist. Something of grace- 
ful dignity always abides with him, and at times 
superb grandeur is there. Many pitfalls of style into 
which Gibbon fell and for which the world has held 
Gibbon blameful, Parkman escaped. If he be not 
our hero among men of letters, where shall we find 
a better name to fill that place ? 

Parkman had no admirer more sincere than John 
Fiske, in whom was continued much of the charm of 
Parkman as to style. Not that Fiske's style was the 
same. It was quite distinctly another kind — more 
familiar, for one thing, and more uncertain in its level ; 
but there was a pervasive and irresistible attraction in 
all the words Fiske ever wrote, whatever might be 
his theme. In research he could not rival Parkman. 
His sources were often secondary, while Parkman's 
were almost always primary. For Fiske the pioneer 
ground had been opened already ; for him came the 
opportunity to interpret events and movements, to pre- 
sent historical pictures, to draw parallels, and to show 
the relations of events here with events that were 
contemporary with them in the older lands of the 
other hemisphere. In these senses John Fiske for 
his generation shone as a beneficent force shedding 
radiance all around him. 

Civilization in America did not begin with the 
landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth ; nor does the 
history of it begin with the books of Bradford or 
Winthrop. Parkman has taught us this. Before 
the Pilgrims had reached their rock-bound coast, 



iy6 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

before Winthrop had sailed, Jamestown had been 
planted, or ever this isle of Manhattan had been sold 
to Peter Minuit, Europeans of another race and faith 
had gone inland, along great rivers and across great 
lakes, to rear aloft in the forests of America the twin 
torches of knowledge and faith. These men were 
Jesuits from France, and their labours were performed 
in many parts of America — for one thing, in Central 
New York, but mainly in lands bordering on the 
great western Lakes. Educated in European schools, 
familiar with the highest life of France and Italy, 
known alike in bishops' palaces and at secular courts, 
they were accomplished scholars, who took up their 
stern tasks in a new and savage land for the glory 
of God and the Church. Of what they saw and 
performed they made conscientious records, and they 
sent their records home, to the chiefs of their order 
in Paris and Rome. 

The result has been that nowhere else in our histori- 
cal literature have we had such exhaustive, well-writ- 
ten, altogether striking narratives of life and adventure 
from the pens of pioneers. Parkman knew this, and 
no man to better purposes ; for without the " Jesuit 
Relations " Parkman could never have written some 
of his books. Other historians have known it, and 
hundreds of scholars as well. Collectors with large 
purses have not only known it, but have gladly 
parted with considerable sums of money, in order 
to acquire copies of any of those scarce books. 
James Lenox found in them a corner-stone for his 



PARKMAN AND SOME OF HIS "SOURCES" 1 77 

library, one of whose choicest ornaments they still 
remain. 

No complete collection of the original " Relations " 
ever has been made, and only a few collections 
of them notable for any suggestion of completeness 
anywhere exist. What the new edition, edited by 
Reuben Gold Thwaites, aims to accomplish is not 
alone completeness. Besides all the printed works 
preserved in Europe or here, it embraces others 
that existed only in the manuscript state. And 
it does something more : it gives on one page the 
original French or Latin text, and on the other an 
English translation of it. To say that it has been a 
boon to American history is to express the merest 
truism. There has not occurred in this country, at 
any one time, any fact of mere editing and printing 
that is comparable in importance to this in histori- 
cal literature. The New York documents edited by 
Dr. O'Callaghan were of great moment to New 
York State, but here are works that have importance 
to many states. Here are source books from which 
a long procession of books make their start. 

In very considerable degree does recorded history 
in North America begin in these books. They are 
fountains, and the waters they give forth are clear as 
crystal, and radiant as sunlight. Their writers had 
style, and with it charm. Writing as they often did 
in the most squalid surroundings, in Indian huts, or 
in the open forest, persecuted by the savages, at best 
living under privation, they still wrote as scholars 



178 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

and men of culture. Their correspondents were 
sometimes great bishops, and again were kings or 
queens. With every word they wrote, inspired as 
it was by events and scenes actually described, the 
life and veracity, the quality called actuality, are of a 
potent sort which gives to the letters a fascination 
unrivalled in epistolary literature. 



VII 

SCOTT'S SURVIVING POPULARITY 

The enormous increase in fiction — in the vol- 
umes produced and in the new men who rise to con- 
temporary fame by writing them — has often raised 
the question : Do the older novelists hold their own ? 
And consequently it has been argued that Thackeray 
and Dickens must have fewer readers than formerly, 
and that even Scott is passing into some neglect. 
Careful observers have never been disturbed by these 
questions, neither as to Thackeray nor as to Dickens, 
and still more positively not in the case of Scott, 
who, more than any other prose writer of his period, 
wrote, not for an age, but for all time. 

The most certain evidence of Scott's survival is 
the successive editions of his works that the public 
calls for. Four or five entirely new ones have in a 
single recent year been brought out in England. 
They have been designed to meet all classes, tastes, 
and purses, and there is no lack of demand for them. 
Fears have been expressed that the supply might 
prove to be greater than the public would absorb, 
but thus far has been seen nothing to confirm them. 
On the contrary, a series of letters from British book- 

i79 



180 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

sellers, printed in the London Academy a few years 
ago, goes to prove their groundlessness. 1 

Many causes might be named for this survival. 
Scott's writings are instinct with life, truth, and 
charm, and yet are pure and wholesome. He wrote 
beautifully because he wrote truthfully. In him was 
verified the art axiom that truth is beauty, and beauty 
truth. Scott pictured periods that are of lasting 
human interest and pictured them accurately. He 

1 Here are some of the reports these booksellers make : — 

" A well-known Oxford Street firm writes : ' The demand for the 
Waverley Novels is as great as ever, but we think the supply is consid- 
erably in excess of the demand. During the past year the public have 
been subscribing to five or six editions. On the whole, there is no 
declension in the sale of Scott's novels, and we are of opinion that 
they will continue to sell for many years to come.' 

"Another London firm replies: ' Undoubtedly Scott is holding his 
position with the public. To sum up, in our experience, Scott, as a 
novelist, is only second in demand to Dickens.' 

" Still another London report says : ' The demand for Scott is stead- 
ily increasing, and at no time have buyers had such a large variety of 
editions from which to choose.' 

" From Edinburgh comes this reply : ' Always a demand for Scott, 
although five new editions seem too many. Scott is certainly holding 
his own.' 

"A West Country correspondent replies as follows (note his star- 
tling suggestion that yet another edition is called for) : ' There is still 
an opening for a " people's Scott." It is beyond dispute that the sales 
of the works of Dickens and Scott never seem to decrease; and al- 
though there are some five new editions of the Waverley Novels just 
put on the market, each of them seems likely to find purchasers.' 

" Lastly, hear the voice of Exeter, furthest removed from the scenes 
of the Waverley Novels, yet not least enthusiastic : ' All editions sell 
steadily. It appears as if the public could not have enough of Scott. 
In my opinion no author is so largely purchased in complete editions.' " 



SCOTT'S SURVIVING POPULARITY 181 

showed us men and women who led sane and manly- 
lives and lived to the nobler ends. He did not 
distort human nature : he ennobled it. 

Integrity in Scott was not merely commercial in- 
tegrity, magnificent as was the final exhibition his 
life gave of that endowment. Scott had intellectual 
soundness, the integrity which in writing fiction will 
not consciously misrepresent a period or lie about 
human nature. We may not see in Fielding and 
Smollett the worst vices of the early eighteenth cen- 
tury, but it is certain that we do not see in their work 
what was best in the life of that time. Thackeray's 
sarcasm may not have lashed the cant and snobbish- 
ness of his age with all the force they deserved ; but 
Thackeray might have inspired his readers with some 
finer enthusiasm had he held loftier notions of his 
fellow-men. Dickens exalted the life of the common 
people : he showed us their sufferings, their heroism, 
their better nature ; much that was of the basest pos- 
sible sort he also showed us. But his was the exag- 
gerated picture : it was strong, purposeful, powerful 
fiction, but wanting in strict intellectual integrity. 
Though never properly to be called caricature, his 
work often approached dangerously near it. 

Scott took sane views of life. If he was optimis- 
tic, he was not an optimist who was visionary. He 
saw good in everything, believing the main forces in 
human activity work for beneficent ends — that, as 
an eminent countryman of his afterward said, the 
great soul of this world is just. His writings must 



1 82 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

survive to delight a yet more remote posterity. So 
long as there is honour in the world, so long as there 
is truth, they will find a home. 

In his own life and conduct he saw not sordid 
things, not the ignoble mind, not the base spirit. 
Sound himself to the heart's core, he had interest 
only in things which were honest and of good repute. 
It is not altogether the genius of Scott that has pre- 
served his popularity. His character, that final 
test of all excellence, remains a large factor. Readers 
feel instinctively that here they have an author in 
whom the man of honour and the man of genius are 
one. No man in English literature since Milton 
has better united both characters ; none in all litera- 
ture since Dante. 

Scott's Edinburgh house, with its tragic associa- 
tions and the story of how fondly he lingered over it 
when the crash came, might well be a place of world 
pilgrimage. The passages in his diary which refer 
to it are among the most pathetic in that moving and 
valiant chronicle. Here were spent twenty-odd years 
of joy and labour. Here he had success and realized 
his fame. Here " Waverley " was begun, and here 
was written many another book the world knows by 
heart. In the rear yard one of his dogs lies buried. 
The place even now has scarcely been altered since 
his time. Mementos of him remain on its walls, an 
autograph letter of his is there, also one of Burns ; 
but the present tenant has no relation to literature. 
The agent of a mortgage company interested in New 



SCOTT'S SURVIVING POPULARITY 1 83 

Zealand lands occupies the house — or did, not so very- 
long ago. 

Scott went forth from this Edinburgh house to 
do the work which, to those who set a higher value 
on character than performance, elevated the man to 
a place which mere authorship never could have won. 
We may justly set our lower values upon Scott's 
later writings and foresee the time when his life of 
Napoleon shall be no more than a literary curiosity, 
but the man who so valiantly converted his pen into 
a very sword, with which to fight his way to freedom 
(a fight which his books triumphantly won for his 
estate after he was dead), must always remain some- 
thing better for our race than anything he ever wrote 
— an example and a possession fit to place in any 
company of heroes. 



VIII 

MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 

The past hundred years has brought into the 
world a remarkable storehouse of information con- 
cerning the private lives of famous men of letters. 
With here and there an exception, authors in no 
former age had been much written about. For pur- 
poses of publication memoir writing was scarcely 
more than an occasional pastime when the nineteenth 
century began. Autobiographies had appeared from 
Gibbon, Colley Cibber, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury ; 
but this form of writing had been rare in literature 
when Moore edited the letters of Byron and the 
diaries of Pepys and Evelyn were brought to light. 
Of Samuel Johnson, thanks to Boswell's way of 
doing his work as a finality, the world knew as much 
as it knows to-day. But how much was known of 
Sterne or Gray, Fielding or Milton ? Adequate 
biographies of these authors were not undertaken 
until times we may still call recent. 

So soon as Byron was dead all men who had known 
him took to writing reminiscences, from Leigh Hunt 
to Moore, from Medwin to Kennedy and Dallas. 
Byron's own works comprise many volumes, but 
the books written about him ere he had been many 

184 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 1 85 

years in his grave comprise more. Byron's potent 
and interesting personality, that "pageant of his 
bleeding heart," accounted for all this. He was not 
only the most celebrated poet but the most celebrated 
Englishman of his time. Financial magnates, noble 
lords, and prime ministers yielded place to him as 
interesting personalities. Shelley caught the hom- 
age of the hour when he called him " the pilgrim of 
eternity." Byron in large measure was the cause of 
this rapid spread of memoir writing and publishing 
— his career in part, but in still larger part his cus- 
tom of making his personality enter so largely into 
everything he wrote, his intensely subjective method. 
The sale of the Byron books was very large. It 
seemed impossible to satisfy the demand for new 
ones. Authors and publishers alike saw what a 
field had here lain unworked. The next genera- 
tion found no longer existing a dearth of literary 
reminiscences. 

Many years ago the compiler of an interesting 
volume of extracts from books of the memoir class 
printed an elaborate list of authors, from whom he 
quoted. For each of four volumes he named about 
eighty distinct publications or 330 less the duplicates. 
It was a striking evidence of the extraordinary 
growth of this class of literature. It pointed also 
to the impossibility of reading more than a small part 
of it during any one short and active life. The list 
applied only to men of letters, having been selected 
with no reference to statesmen, actors, or men en- 



1 86 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

gaged in other professions, about whom long lists 
could have been easily compiled. 

Few men of letters have ever written dull memoirs. 
The facts seem to reverse some notions as to ego- 
tistical persons being social bores. Obviously there 
are forms of egotism which give rare delight. How 
else could autobiography have acquired a fascination, 
such as no other kind of writing in the historical 
class possesses in like degree ? Men whose other 
writings find few if any readers to-day — and, for 
example, Colley Cibber — wrote stories of their own 
lives which no one can read without pleasure. 
Franklin's fame as an author with a large portion 
of mankind rests entirely with his autobiography. 
Many schoolboys had read that book long before 
they knew what was Franklin's real and fixed place 
in the world's history. 

When the Carlyle books came out after his death, 
criticism was made of him as a great egotist, per- 
petually throwing himself into what he wrote. This 
was true as to the facts, and yet his writings lose 
none of their worth or interest because of it. We as 
human beings have lasting interest in all things gen- 
uinely human, whether it be deep suffering, high 
intelligence, or great success. Byron, in wedding his 
own unhappiness to immortal verse, aroused enthusi- 
asm as well as sympathy. A touch of nature once 
more made the world kin. 

Carlyle preached nothing more persistently than 
heroism and reverence for heroes. As an author, if 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 1 87 

not as a husband, he made it manifest that he was 
himself a hero, great as his own Luther, Knox, or 
Cromwell. That quality of nobility in labour, joined 
almost to an unconsciousness of it, gave his reminis- 
cences rare interest, and the fame of them after two 
decades has scarcely dimmed. Small and sordid 
natures displease us when they talk of themselves. 
The noble ones confer priceless blessings. They 
make the world wider, life becomes easier, and duty 
more simple. To write of one's self and not be a bore, 
one must write in noble ways of things themselves 
noble, must show, in fact, that it is an immortal soul 
and not a mere sordid nature that prompts the words. 
To what extremity in bare literalness, in rash frank- 
ness, memoir writing has of late years gone, is best 
illustrated in two works of quite recent years — the 
autobiography of Hamerton and the memoirs of 
Hare. Each writer had been known to a wide 
circle, although neither had reached what could be 
called high distinction in literature. Certain points 
of similarity in experience give to the earlier page of 
both works features remarkably similar. Each writer 
had had an unhappy childhood. In the one case 
the father, made miserable by the loss of his wife, 
took to strong drink — deep potations of brandy were 
his daily indulgence — and he abused his son brutally ; 
in the other, both parents regretted the son's birth, 
gladly turned him over to relatives, and never thence- 
forth paid him any attention — indeed, seldom ever 
saw him. 



1 88 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

The two stories made melancholy reading and were 
narrated with a literal frankness that made one shrink 
from the page. Such pictures of family life among 
well-to-do English folk are perhaps more common 
than the world is wont to suspect ; the Englishman 
at his best is a charming being, — at his worst, an 
offence and a menace. It was extraordinary that 
both Hamerton and Hare should have written with 
such fulness and exactness. The Englishman is 
commonly a man of much reserve, with great family 
pride, but here were memoir writers opening wide 
the doors to closets wherein grim skeletons hung. In 
Hare's case the disclosures related not only to his 
father and mother, but to many other relatives — 
brothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Jealousies and 
small quarrels were set forth with the utmost free- 
dom and as if they were of weight and moment to 
the world. If one did not tire of them (family 
quarrels are things that most persons seldom tire 
of hearing described) one certainly never ceased to 
wonder at a writer devoid of wish to conceal them. 
Neither in Hamerton's case nor Hare's were these 
details material to the formation of a character, except 
in the sense of being injurious ; nor did they seriously 
aid in shaping a career. 

But such were the beginnings from which came 
careers well known to a large world — Hamerton, 
with those books of his, chief among them " The 
Intellectual Life " ; Hare, with books almost as well 
known. Born in Rome, reared in an English rectory, 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 1 89 

educated in Oxford, a man of much leisure in large 
continental towns, Hare had had the wide experience 
in walks about Rome and Paris without which his 
books, charmed they never so powerfully, could not 
possess their serious and peculiar value. 

Our later years have seen books of memoirs 
more inspiring and more certain of remembrance — 
that memoir of Tennyson by his son, chief perhaps 
among them all, and several splendid collections of 
letters — the Brownings', Hugo's, Stevenson's, Low- 
ell's, Bismarck's — a noble company fit for long 
remembrance and perpetual benediction to readers 
who shall come after them. Once more, and for the 
twentieth time, they remind us how rich is literature 
in this class of writing, and how each year makes the 
world richer still. 

Nothing in books attracts more strongly the best 
minds ; certainly not fiction, not the history of 
nations, not books of travel and adventure in far-off 
lands. The " Diary " of Pepys holds sway where 
Dry den fails. Cowper's " Letters " are better read- 
ing than Cowper's verse. Boswell is cherished 
where Johnson's own writings are neglected. Even 
the " Letters " of Lowell promise to afford delight 
in that remote time when Lowell's verse shall have 
become an unfamiliar source of pleasure. When the 
popular works of this hour shall have become unknown 
names, men will read and take delight in Audubon's 
" Journals," in which we see with force and charm a 
man superior to the slings and arrows of evil fortune. 



190 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 






There was Max Miiller's book, which no dry-as-dust 
Orientalist wrote. A strong-souled, sound-minded, 
eminently human man shone forth in delightful remi- 
niscences of a boyhood spent in Germany, a man- 
hood in Oxford, recollections of Goethe and Lowell, 
of Tennyson and Gladstone, of Pusey and Oliver 
Wendell Holmes. 

Hugo's letters deepened the already keen interest 
we had in all things known of his life. From pov- 
erty he advanced to independence, with money 
enough to support his wife and children, were he to 
die ; and then, with a revolution overturning France 
once more, he was an exile in Brussels and Guernsey, 
where he lived on 1200 francs a year, mourning the 
death of John Brown and the crisis in our republic. 
He was ever vital and human in all he wrote of him- 
self, strong in purpose, fixed in ideals. 

Hugo's life was as romantic as any story he ever 
told. Born with Napoleon in the full flush of power, 
his parents had been identified with the two oppos- 
ing parties, which in the late years of the eighteenth 
century had been in violent struggle for supremacy 
in France. His mother was an ardent Royalist, a 
native of La Vendee, that last, most unyielding 
stronghold of Church and nobility. She had part 
in the famous insurrections, where a hundred thou- 
sand lives are believed to have been lost, and with 
Mesdames de Bouchamp and de La Rochejaquelein 
was surrounded in a wood and subdued after the in- 
surrection had long baffled the skill of generals to put 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 191 

it down. Hugo's paternal grandfather belonged to 
the old nobility, dated his title from the middle of 
the sixteenth century, and died on the scaffold under 
Robespierre. The father of the poet linked his for- 
tunes with Bonaparte, became a general in his army, 
and finally a governor of important provinces in 
Spain. Before the boy was five years of age, Gen- 
eral Hugo's office had carried him to Elba, Corsica, 
and Switzerland, and then into Calabria to suppress 
an insurrection. Into these countries he took his son, 
and in Italy allowed him to study Roman history and 
the Italian language. Before young Hugo was eight 
he had seen Spain. 

It was fitting that a child who had witnessed so 
much should develop talents early. He wrote verse 
of striking merit in the tenth year of his age, thus 
offering a parallel to the precocity of many English 
authors — Pope, Chatterton, and Bryant, not to men- 
tion Tasso among Italians. 

If in early life Hugo saw poverty, at its close he 
had what for an author was affluence. In middle age 
he was fairly independent, but in exile he again saw 
laborious days. Some years before the Revolution of 
1848 he said that after twenty-eight years of exertion, 
the total of his earnings had been " about 500,000 
francs," all from the use of his pen, or an average 
of about $3600 a year. Meanwhile he had educated 
four children, and with true independence had de- 
clined to accept scholarships, not wishing to " saddle 
the state with what I could pay myself," 



192 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Of these 500,000 francs Hugo still possessed 
300,000 francs, all invested and yielding an income 
from which, were he to die, his wife and children 
might live. From this income and from the writ- 
ing he was still doing, he was now able to support 
eleven persons. He owed no man anything. He 
had made nothing in trade or speculation. He gave 
something to charity ; wore overcoats that cost him 
twenty-five francs ; seldom had a new hat ; walked 
in winter without a fall and went to the legislative 
chamber on foot. He counted living happy in that 
he preserved the two blessings without which he 
could not live — " tranquil conscience and complete 
independence." 

Then came the revolution and his exile — first in 
Brussels and next in the island of Guernsey, where 
he established his home "on the summit of a rock, 
with all the grandeur of the world and the sky before 
me." Here at Guernsey he wrote " The Toilers of 
the Sea." Poverty fenced him round. " I must live 
like a Stoic and a poor man," he wrote. With a bed, 
a table, and two chairs, he toiled with his pen each 
day and lived on 1200 francs a year. 

In turning from memoirs such as these to the 
memoirs of Talleyrand, we turn from charming 
frankness to studied reserve. Long had those me- 
moirs been awaited, pertaining as they do to one of 
the fruitfullest subjects of memoir writing the world 
has known, a complete set of all extant books on 
Napoleon's era, forming a library of many hundred 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 19^ 

volumes. The Metternich, R^musat, and Marbot me- 
moirs, works of the highest value concerning that era, 
preceded the memoirs of Talleyrand by a few years 
only ; but from Talleyrand even greater things were 
with reason looked for. He and the Emperor, in 
later years, did not love each other, having quarrelled 
long before the exile to Elba. His " irreverent rev- 
erence of Autun " had foreseen and predicted the 
Emperor's overthrow, and had indeed helped to bring 
it about, assisting gladly in the restoration of the 
Bourbon king. 

Louis Napoleon was in mortal dread of things 
which those memoirs might disclose about his uncle, 
and in 1868, when they were announced for publica- 
tion, procured a postponement for twenty years. 
The restriction appears to have been finally re- 
moved only by the low state of the Bonaparte for- 
tunes. Talleyrand in his message to posterity failed 
completely to make a sensation. The memoirs had 
either been edited into a state of innocuousness or 
the author wrote them with particular circumspec- 
tion. He had a way in his lifetime of using lan- 
guage to conceal thought. The world had some 
right after waiting half a century to expect that he 
would tell the truth in his memoirs. He always 
declared that they would set him right, especially 
with the church. But they neither set him right nor 
set him wrong. They were interesting, as was in- 
evitable, but decorous and devoid of colour. No books 
of the memoir class from a person of distinction have 
o 



194 



OUR LITERARY DELUGE 



in twenty years been found so uninteresting and been 
neglected so soon. 

From minor walks of life few notable memoirs 
have appeared. This, of course, is understandable. 
Happy have been the individuals, as well as the 
nations, that had no history — no stories to tell. 
Noble lives in these walks there have been of which 
the world possesses no written records and which 
must remain forever unknown — resolute souls that 
have kept the world strong and made life beauti- 
ful, the very names forgotten beyond recall. One 
such record, widely read, has, however, appeared 
in recent years, but it evoked as much blame as 
praise for the author of it — Barrie's "Margaret 
Ogilvy." 

Barrie's sketch of his mother carried wide com- 
ment as to the propriety of a son thus writing of 
a mother whose life had been exclusively domestic. 
Margaret Ogilvy was a plain, obscure Scotch woman, 
her life absorbed in home duties, her one ambition 
the success of her son in literature, — and he gave 
her fame. Deep consciousness of debt to her, a debt 
deeper perhaps than most sons owe to a mother, 
prompted the tribute. It is true that the sketch 
shed light on Scottish life, but a desire to do so 
probably had no part in Barrie's motive. His aim 
was essentially personal, although with fine art 
instincts the methods employed obscured the aim. 
Barrie must have foreseen the criticism his act would 
evoke, and must have known he could not thwart it. 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 1 95 

He desired to acknowledge the obligation exactly in 
this manner. There was no other manner in which 
he could acknowledge it with the same certainty of 
effect. 

There, accordingly, the record stands in all its 
publicity, for the public to read as it will or as it 
will not. Barrie's motive was disinterested and even 
devotional. That he made money from the book 
is not less true than it was inevitable. The act he 
desired to perform he could not perform and avoid 
getting publishers' checks for it. True, he might 
have published the book privately, but it would then 
have failed of wide circulation. The world could 
not have known the manner of woman his mother 
was, the faith she had in him, the inspiration she 
gave him. Barrie's purpose would have missed 
fulfilment. 

The reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton 
reminded us how much women have done to increase 
the delights men take in memoirs. What a store of 
pleasure lies ready for any one who has not read 
Caroline Fox's " Memories of Old Friends," and how 
sweet and beneficent a life is unfolded in the recollec- 
tions of Mary Cowden Clarke. Readers several 
years ago saw in Mrs. Sherwood's "An Epistle to 
Posterity " how wide a range of experience had been 
possible to an American woman, with recollections 
going back to childhood, — when, in riding from a 
railway station to Marshfield, she sat on a box with 
Daniel Webster, — and embracing Rome and Paris, 



196 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

England and Switzerland. What profit and charm 
also lie in the " Letters " of Dorothy Osborne, and 
the biography of one of the sweetest and bravest of 
New England women, as described in the memoir of 
Louisa M. Alcott. 

Mrs. Stanton's recollections, covering eighty years, 
reached the public as a surprise, having been almost 
unheralded. But they are interesting for more legiti- 
mate reasons — the impressive and protracted public 
career of the author ; her inflexible devotion to and 
sincerity in a cause long unpopular. Whatever 
ridicule may have descended upon the woman's 
rights movement twenty or thirty years ago, one 
finds little of it extant now, and to more than any 
other cause this is due to Mrs. Stanton. She, from 
the first, gave the movement character, dignity, and 
grace. 

Here was a woman — in the highest American 
sense well born, well educated, at home in polite 
society, welcome everywhere, a mother of many chil- 
dren, a devoted wife, an ornament alike to society 
and her sex. Twenty-five years ago, when a student 
in an American college, one morning in a lecture room 
there appeared in one of the front seats, to which 
she had been escorted by the president of the college, 
a woman with white hair, a round, cheerful, radiant 
face, and beautifully clad, with a carriage all grace and 
gentleness, to whom every boy in that crowded room 
would gladly have made respectful obeisance. She 
had a son in that class room, a boy whom we all 



MEMOIRS AND MEMOIR WRITERS 1 97 

loved, who was the peer of our best, — and the woman 
was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 1 

1 A brief list of other memoir writers may be given here. Among 
literary men and women should at least be named : Sir Henry Taylor, 
Evelyn, Crabbe Robinson, Greeley, Newman, Julia Ward Howe, John 
Stuart Mill, Charles T. Congdon, and Henry F. Amiel. Among those 
whose books relate to public affairs, political and military, are these : 
General Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, Thomas H. 
Benton, James G. Blaine, Gouverneur Morris, Reuben Davis, Meneval, 
Bourrienne, Mme. Junot, Garibaldi, Cellini, Commines, Greville, Gram- 
mont, Saint-Simon, Mme. Campan, and Pepys. Others who do not 
readily fall into either of these classes are Franklin, Berlioz, Spurgeon, 
Samuel Breck, Audubon, Joseph Jefferson, Arthur Young, and Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury. 

This list is not intended to be a select enumeration of the very 
best; nor has it been chosen at random. Some thirty writers are 
named. They are offered merely as among the best. Any restricted 
list would be likely to include the most of them. 



IX 

BURNS AS AN EDINBURGH LION 

Of inadequate pecuniary rewards, where better 
shall we find an illustration than in Burns ? Milton, 
Hawthorne, Carlyle, Poe, and all that company who 
struggled so long but not in vain, must yield first 
place to him. 

The river Ayr is closely identified with the greater 
part of Burns's life. Dying at thirty-seven, all but 
ten years of a short career was spent in the Scottish 
shire to which this stream gives its name. Alloway, 
the birthplace, lies only a few miles from the town 
of Ayr, which has its site where the river enters the 
sea. On its banks one of the largest villages is 
Mauchline. The praise which Burns has bestowed 
upon those waters need not be ascribed to mere partial- 
ity. For half its course the Ayr is romantic and 
picturesque. With precipitous and rocky banks 
clothed with trees, its dark waters wind their way 
to the sea. 

Burns was living on the Mossgiel farm when he 
published his first volume — that famous Kilmarnock 
edition of " Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect," 
now one of the scarcest volumes in the literature of 
that time, a single copy of it being worth several 

198 



BURNS AS AN EDINBURGH LION 199 

times more than the whole edition cost the pub- 
lishers. Kilmarnock lies not far from Mossgiel — 
to the northwest of it in the same Scotch shire. 
From the sale of this edition Burns derived .£20, 
which sum he intended to use in paying for his 
passage to Jamaica. Great was the immediate popu- 
larity of the volume, with old and young alike, 
throughout Ayrshire. "I can well remember," wrote 
Robert Heron years afterward, " how even ploughboys 
and maidservants would have gladly bestowed the 
wages they earned most hardly, and with which they 
wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might 
procure the works of Burns." It was this volume 
which led the great Dugald Stewart to seek the 
acquaintance of Burns. But it led to a more momen- 
tous event in Burns's life — that triumphant visit to 
Edinburgh, the journey being made on a borrowed 
pony, which he rode from his home to the famous 
capital of the north, where the greatest honours a poet 
could receive awaited him. 

It is worth while recalling here some of the inci- 
dents of that Edinburgh visit. Lion that he became 
in what was then perhaps the most exclusive literary 
society in the world, he lodged there for weeks with 
an old Mauchline acquaintance, sharing with him a 
single room and bed, for which they together paid three 
shillings a week. He sought out alone the neglected 
grave of Fergusson, knelt and kissed the sod above 
it, and resolved to erect the monument he afterward 
did raise there. Without a single letter of introduc- 



200 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

tion, there was opened to him every door in Edin- 
burgh. He not only won the good opinion of 
patrician men, but of high-born ladies, one of 
whom, a duchess, declared that he was the only 
man who in his behaviour and conversation had ever 
taken her off her feet. Francis Jeffrey, then a lad, 
saw him in the street, and never forgot the sight. 
Walter Scott, whose age was only fifteen, chanced 
to be in a room where Burns was entertained. The 
boy was able to supply him with some information 
which no one else happened to possess, whereupon 
Burns, as Scott afterward said, "rewarded me with 
a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, 
I then received with very great pleasure." 

With every person whom he met Burns held his 
own in that intellectual capital. He showed, as 
Lockhart said, that in the society of the most emi- 
nent men of Scotland, he was where " he was entitled 
to be." Every one was struck by his manly bearing, 
and with the extraordinary vigour of his conversation. 
" Nothing perhaps was more remarkable," said 
Dugald Stewart, " among his various attainments, 
than the fluency, precision, and originality of his 
language when he spoke in company." Plainly 
dressed in his best farmer clothes, Burns mani- 
fested genuine freedom of spirit and originality of 
thought. Whatever might be the social superiority 
of those whom he met, he through higher intellectual 
gifts dominated the scene. It was this Edinburgh 
triumph, following the Kilmarnock success, which 



BURNS AS AN EDINBURGH LION 201 

finally induced Burns to abandon his Jamaica scheme 
and remain in Scotland, where only ten years of life 
remained ere the light of that heaven-inspired genius 
should go out forever amid such ignoble sorrow. 

The birthplace of Burns, the cottage of clay which 
his father built with his own hands, may still be seen 
at the roadside as one travels from Ayr toward the 
bridge that crosses the Doon, — a cottage almost as 
familiar in the world as the famous Stratford cottage, 
— a bridge which Burns's own song has celebrated 
for all time. Not far from the cottage rise the small 
roofless walls of " the auld haunted kirk," forever 
connected with the story of Tarn O'Shanter. Within 
the same enclosure of green sleep the forefathers 
of the hamlet, and among them the father of Burns. 
William Burns cultivated a nursery garden at Allo- 
way and was a devout man of stern probity and firm 
temper — " a pleasant saint of the old Scottish 
stamp," Principal Shairp calls him. For that immor- 
tal picture of peasant life, "The Cotter's Saturday 
Night," Burns's own home at Alloway served as the 
model, after sketching which he declared with honest 
pride, — 

From scenes like these Old Scotia's grandeur springs. 

Burns was seven years old when the father gave 
up his nursery garden at Alloway and leased another 
farm two miles distant, bearing the name Mount 
Oliphant. Here the poet lived from his seventh to 
his eighteenth year, and here he received all the 



202 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

education from teachers that he ever had — first 
from Murdoch, whom his father, combining with 
four neighbours, hired for the purpose, and second 
from the father himself. Murdoch's reminiscences 
of that time describe Gilbert Burns as having "all 
the mirth and liveliness," while Robert "wore gen- 
erally a grave and thoughtful look." 

At Mount Oliphant stern was the struggle the 
family had. Robert thrashed corn at thirteen, and 
at fifteen was his father's chief labourer in the 
field — a life which he afterward described as 
combining "the cheerless gloom of a hermit with 
the unceasing moil of a galley slave." Under 
Murdoch's influence he was started in knowledge 
of history and literature. He read lives of Hanni- 
bal and Wallace, and the writings of Fergusson. 
Smollett, Pope, and Addison became familiar to 
him. French he acquired readily. The landlord of 
Mount Oliphant had been generous in his treatment 
of the family, but he died while they were tenants. 
Their condition soon became hard, owing to a merci- 
less factor, — a man " who wrote letters which set 
the whole family in tears." His name is forgotten, 
but his portrait the poet has drawn for all times. 

Here, on this sterile soil, indications were first 
given of that genius for writing verse which was 
to win for the ploughman's son renown through the 
world. Burns's earliest lines, called sometimes " O, 
once I loved a Bonnie Lass," and sometimes " Hand- 
some Nell," were composed at Mount Oliphant. 



BURNS AS AN EDINBURGH LION 203 

Nellie KUpatrick, a young woman who laboured in 
the fields with Burns, was the heroine of this song. 

Unable to endure at Mount Oliphant the rapaci- 
ties of the factor whose letter set the family in 
tears, the poet's father in 1777 (the year of Bur- 
goyne's surrender) removed to Lochlea, an upland, 
undulating farm of 130 acres in the Parish of Tar- 
bolton. Here seven years were spent, and they 
were years of greater comfort than the family had 
known before. 

Now began that absorbing pastime to which so 
many of Burns's early years were to be given — the 
making of love. Gilbert Burns has told us how 
his brother was in the secret of half the love 
affairs of the whole Parish of Tarbolton, and how 
he was never without at least one affair of his 
own. Robert had always a particular jealousy of 
people richer than himself or of more consequence ; 
so that his love rarely settled on persons of this 
description. 

In the Parish of Mauchline and two or three 
miles distant from Lochlea lies the farm of Moss- 
giel, to which in 1783 went the Burns brothers. 
They had taken a lease of it on their own account. 
Their father's affairs had been threatened with a 
crash. A few months later the father died and was 
buried in the old Alloway kirkyard. The widowed 
mother and the younger children then joined the 
brothers at Mossgiel — a farm of 118 upland acres, 
the soil one of clay, and poor. 



204 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

Burns began life at Mossgiel with good resolu- 
tions, but to no successful results. " I read farm- 
ing books," he says, " I calculated crops, I attended 
markets, and, in short, in spite of the devil, the 
world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise 
man; but the first year from unfortunately buying 
bad seed, the second from a late harvest, we lost 
half our crops. This overset all my wisdom." 

Four years were spent at Mossgiel. Three 
things, says Principal Shairp, were witnessed by 
that bare moorland farm — "the wreck of his hopes 
as a farmer, the revelation of his genius as a poet, 
and the frailty of his character as a man." Love- 
making was a pastime which had filled a large 
part of his thoughts at Mossgiel. But he was not 
given to conviviality, for his brother has declared 
that his private outlays, including his clothing,, 
never exceeded seven pounds a year. The farm- 
house at Mossgiel still stands, although its walls 
have been raised and a slate roof has supplanted 
the thatched roof of the poet's time. The house 
stands sixty yards back from the roadway, from 
which it was shut out by a hedge of thorn, which 
the brothers are said to have planted. Back of 
the house lies the field where Burns ploughed up the 
daisy. It was in another field near this house that 
Burns overturned with his plough the mouse's nest. 

The poems in which these events are commem- 
orated were written here — in an upper room, or 
garret, reached by trap stairs. " Thither," says 



BURNS AS AN EDINBURGH LION 205 

Chambers, "when he had returned from his day's 
work, the poet used to retire and seat himself at a 
small deal table lighted by a narrow skylight in 
the roof to transcribe the verses which he had 
composed in the fields. His favourite time for com- 
position was at the plough. Long years after, his 
sister, Mrs. Begg, used to tell how, when her 
brother had gone forth again to field work, she 
would steal up to the garret, and search the drawer 
of the deal table for the verses which Robert had 
newly transcribed." Here at Mossgiel were written 
not only "To a Mountain Daisy," but "The Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night " and many other compositions 
which gave to his first-published volume its imme- 
diate popularity all over Ayrshire. 

Such were the scenes and such the privations 
amid which from her own soil Nature raised up that 
prince among Scotsmen, — the man in homespun, 
to whom in Edinburgh was easily accorded his in- 
tellectual inheritance, before whom the first minds 
and the first personalities of that capital, so soon as 
he appeared among them, gracefully made way. 
Elemental talents, — how greater far are they than 
all we may ever acquire in schools, and how to them 
the world bows down, casting aside its constructed 
framework of worldly rank, power, and wealth, and 
all its pretensions to superiority ! 



X 

PEPYS, THE LITTLE AND THE GREAT 



Pepys' s Diary is one of the curiosities of all litera- 
ture. Written as it was in cipher and solely for its 
author's pleasure, it lays bare an inner soul in its 
most secret thoughts. Never again are we likely 
to see so clearly exposed a man's follies and weak- 
nesses. The reader is often at loss to understand 
how any one possessed of sanity could have written 
as Pepys wrote. His mental operations seem not 
infrequently like those of the underwitted, or as if 
a child's mind were at work. And yet Pepys had 
very considerable parts; he was a man of mark in 
his own day, intellectually and morally superior to 
his immediate environment. 

The period the diary covers is about ten years. 
It lay in Magdalen College long neglected. In fact, 
it was not until the year 1819 — or 115 years after 
the death of Pepys — that Mr. John Smith, an under- 
graduate of St. John's College, Cambridge, under- 
took, at the instance of the Master of Magdalen, a 
translation of the formidable manuscript. He was 
engaged on the work nearly three years, and occu- 
pied himself with it from twelve to fourteen hours 
each day. During his labours John Smith must 

206 



. 



PEPYS, THE LITTLE AND THE GREAT 207 

have shared many of the delightful sensations of 
another man of the same name when making ex- 
plorations on the coast of North America. Four 
years after its completion Lord Braybrooke, a brother 
of the Master of Magdalen, published Smith's trans- 
lation, with notes and a brief preface in which he 
boldly declared, what everybody has since admitted, 
that "there never was a publication more implicitly 
to be relied upon for the authenticity of its statements 
and the exactness with which every fact is detailed." 

The Mynors Bright edition was published in Lon- 
don in six volumes several years ago, the last volume 
appearing in 1879. Mynors Bright was President 
and Senior Fellow of Magdalen College, Cambridge, 
when, in 1872, he had learned the cipher in which 
the book was written, and at the suggestion of a 
friend undertook to read the Diary afresh. The 
cipher used by Pepys was not the system known as 
" Rich's," as stated by Lord Braybrooke, but a sys- 
tem composed by Shelton and detailed in a book 
called " Tachy-graphy, or Short Writing : The most 
Easie, Exact, and Speedie." With the help of the 
edition of Shelton, published in 1671, Mr. Bright 
deciphered the whole manuscript, and the chief re- 
sult was about one-third more matter than any former 
edition contained. 

Mr. Bright's edition was at the time commonly 
accepted as final, although in his preface he acknow- 
ledged that he had neglected to use those parts 
which gave accounts of Pepys's daily work in office. 



208 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

It appears, however, that whereas Mr. Bright added 
new matter equal to a third of the whole, he left 
unprinted about one-fifth of the whole. But he 
had translated the entire diary from that formi- 
dable manuscript in cipher filling six volumes and 
covering 3000 closely written pages, and he be- 
queathed his transcript to Magdalen College. 

Mr. Wheatley's later and now the most complete 
edition is the result of a decision to print those por- 
tions of the translation which Bright did not print. 
In this edition we do not possess Pepys's entire work, 
for exception was made in the case of " a few pas- 
sages which cannot possibly be printed." Mr. 
Wheatley, anticipating the charge of unnecessary 
squeamishness that has since come from readers, 
insisted that there was nothing squeamish about his 
decision and begged readers "to have faith in the 
judgment of the editor." Still the fact remains that 
the edition lacks completeness, and that nothing 
short of a personal examination of the manuscript at 
Oxford — certainly a difficult task even if a possible 
one — can enable any student of the work to know 
what these passages are. 

Pepys wrote them sometimes in French, again in 
Latin or Greek, and even made use of Spanish. Mr. 
Bright, in making the translation, was at first sur- 
prised at these frequent uses of foreign tongues, and 
we may readily imagine what the feelings of the 
reverend gentleman were, once he had found their 
equivalents in his own tongue. There does not 



PEPYS, THE LITTLE AND THE GREAT 209 

seem to exist any good reason why Mr. Wheatley 
might not have allowed these passages to remain in 
the several foreign tongues used by Pepys, either as 
foot-notes or in the text. Certainly a custom which 
had before been employed, and notably in the case of 
Suetonius, might with advantage have been resorted 
to for the purpose of giving the world an absolutely 
complete version of this most famous and most inter- 
esting of all diaries ever written. 

Readers of the Diary have seldom been impressed 
with its author as a man of elevated mind, large 
capacity for usefulness, or dignity of person, and yet 
we know that Pepys was much esteemed in his own 
day, and that the honours which came to him were 
fairly earned. No better evidence of this should be 
required than that which the pure-minded and enlight- 
ened John Evelyn wrote on the day of Pepys's death. 
" A very worthy, industrious, and curious person was 
Pepys," said he ; " none in England exceeding him 
in knowledge of the navy." After his retirement 
from office, Evelyn described him as living at Clap- 
ham "in a very noble and sweet place, where he 
enjoyed the fruits of his labours in great prosperity." 

Pepys was no inconsiderable personage in his time. 
Collier, who was his contemporary, affirms that he 
" was without exception the greatest and most useful 
minister that ever filled the same situations in Eng- 
land." The rules and establishments at the Admi- 
ralty, which remained in force when Collier wrote, 
were of Pepys's own introduction, and he was "a 
p 



210 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

most studious promoter " of order and discipline. 
In all persons whom he advanced in office the essen- 
tials required were "sobriety, diligence, capacity, 
loyalty, and subjection to command," and when these 
were wanting "no interest or authority were capable 
of moving him in favour of the highest pretender." 
He discharged his duty "with perfect integrity" 
and neglected his own fortune. He was held in 
great esteem for his learning and judgment, and he 
was uncommonly munificent in the advancement of 
industry, learning, and the arts. Collier regarded his 
morality as " the severest morality of a philosopher." 
Morality is, of course, relative. Collier's statement, 
true of Pepys in his time, could not be true in ours. 
Better testimony than the words of Collier is the 
fact that John Evelyn was Pepys's friend. Scott said 
of Evelyn that his " Sylva " was still the manual of 
English planters, and that his life, manners, and prin- 
ciples, as illustrated in his memoirs, ought equally to 
be the manual of English gentlemen. Evelyn re- 
cords that Pepys " had been for near forty years so 
much my particular friend that Mr. Jackson sent me 
complete mourning, desiring me to be one to hold 
up the pall of his magnificent obsequies," and adds 
that Pepys " was universally beloved, hospitable, gen- 
erous, learned in many things, skilled in music, and 
a very great cherisher of learned men, of whom he 
had the conversation." Pepys died in reduced cir- 
cumstances, though he had seen very prosperous 
days. 



PEPYS, THE LITTLE AND THE GREAT 211 

The integrity of Pepys was beyond question, the 
esteem in which he was held was great, and his learn- 
ing found admirers. Many public enterprises were 
directly benefited by him, and when he rose to office 
as Secretary to the Admiralty the appointment was 
strictly a reward of merit, no man in England being 
thought to possess equal qualifications. How well 
he conducted himself in office, needs no proof further 
than what is on record. He, along with very few, 
had the courage to remain at his post in London 
during the awful plague which desolated that town 
in the time of the second Charles. 

Not only did Pepys survive all the mutations of 
office in Charles's time, but he held on into the reign 
of the second James, at whose coronation, such was 
the rank to which he had risen, Pepys marched in 
the procession immediately behind the canopy of the 
King. Pepys, we are to remember (and be this said 
to his lasting honour), in that dissolute age of adven- 
ture, while still without settled means of support, 
made no ambitious marriage : his wife was Elizabeth 
St. Michael, her parents French, "a beautiful and 
portionless girl of fifteen." 

The most trivial and casual items in this Diary 
show a thousand times the complete sincerity with 
which Pepys everywhere discloses his real nature. 
Sir Arthur Helps long ago remarked that his diary 
was the truest book ever written. Thackeray's praise 
of " Tom Jones," as affording a rare picture of a real 
man, may be applied to the Diary of Pepys ; for no- 



212 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

where among the writings of men, either in books 
intended for publication, letters intended for the per- 
son to whom they were addressed, or in other writ- 
ings of which we know, can be found so thorough a 
revelation of the secret impulses, actual feelings, and 
pleasures which pervade the life-history of a human 
being. 

Pepys, using a cipher, felt absolutely secure in his 
privacy. He never poses, never writes for any one 
but himself, and probably never before, among all 
the records human hands have made with pens, was 
so lucid and trustworthy a record made of the secret 
workings of a man's heart. Pepys, after his time, 
was a worldly-minded man, ambitious to be with the 
great, but faithful in the discharge of trusts. He had 
more than one human weakness, — a marked love of 
himself, more or less inexcusable self-indulgence, and 
in many things was vain. These facts are incon- 
testable ; and yet no one can overlook the commenda- 
tion which John Evelyn bestowed. 

All this goes to show us once more how little we 
ever know what men and women really are. We 
know only the outsides of them. Of the individual 
with whom we daily associate, we form estimates with 
which prompt agreement might be obtained from 
others. But many times these estimates stand at 
variance with the person we should see, could he 
only be made to disclose himself in a diary after the 
manner of Pepys. 

Little did Pepys dream, when writing that he 



PEPYS, THE LITTLE AND THE GREAT 21 3 

" must be contented to set down no more than is fit 
for them [his family] and all the world to know," 
that- in one hundred years his secrets would be pub- 
lished, and thus made to constitute a book that would 
be as much talked about as any in the language. 
Autobiographies are always charming reading, but, 
with rare exceptions, they have been written for 
publication. Their authors pose, and conceal what 
would really be the most interesting facts. 

It is the surpassing merit of Pepys's book that it 
conceals nothing — absolutely nothing. Carlyle, 
when he had finished his " French Revolution," said 
to Mrs. Carlyle, " My Jeannie, lass, they have not 
had for two hundred years any book that came more 
truly from a man's very heart." In a different sense 
from what Carlyle meant, but still in a true sense, 
the Diary of Pepys "came from a man's very 
heart." It was not a heart swayed with emotion 
such as Bunyan knew when he wrote his wonderfully 
truthful book, or such as Carlyle knew when writing 
for dear life itself and under an intense moral im- 
pulse. It was simply a heart swayed by the common 
everyday emotions of human nature. There was no 
tragedy in Pepys's life, and for the most part his 
years were peaceful. Had he played some heroic 
part on a large stage, the world would think better 
of his morals, no doubt, but the interest of these vol- 
umes would scarcely have been heightened. It is the 
human nature in them that absorbs our interest. 
There is no room for the hero. 



XI 



CHESTERFIELD, THE FORGOTTEN AND THE 
REMEMBERED 

Lord Chesterfield's view of life was essentially 
a sordid one. The rewards he has obtained are the 
reverse of those he sought. As usually happens in 
this world, they are exactly the rewards he deserved, 
and in this there is much to console us. Chester- 
field's personal and political prestige, great as it was, 
has been utterly forgotten. He is remembered as an 
author — the very last honour he could have sought. 
This honour has come to him, not from things which 
he published himself, or ever wished published, but 
from private letters he never intended the world 
should see, and which quite likely he would have 
burned rather than had printed. Mr. Sayle, one of 
his editors, has properly cited this as another example 
of the fact that " our best work is that which is our 
heart production." In Chesterfield's other achieve- 
ments nothing was quite genuine ; certainly nothing 
was disinterested, and that fact long since was found 
out. Mankind judged his worldly and selfish activi- 
ties at their full value and proceeded, as its manner 
is, to forget them. 

Could Chesterfield have had his own way, and 
214 



CHESTERFIELD 21 5 

made impossible the publication of these letters, his 
name would have passed into oblivion. Scarcely any 
one ever thinks of him as having been something 
more in his day than an author. And yet he was the 
English ambassador to The Hague, made speeches 
that were admired, and was Viceroy of Ireland and 
Secretary of State, offices in which he gained consid- 
erable contemporary renown. From them he derived 
the reputation he enjoyed. It was that reputation, 
moreover, which inspired the active interest which 
the public afterward bestowed upon his letters, when 
his daughter-in-law took the liberty of making them 
public. 

Chesterfield's failure to obtain the highest eminence 
as a statesman has been attributed to the caution of 
his nature. He was a man in whom moderation of 
mind was the normal state. Well-balanced though 
he was, his mind lacked energy and concentration of 
purpose. Chesterfield never got outside himself and 
matters of immediate gain. He seems forever to 
have been conscious of what he was doing for the 
moment, adjusting means to ends in a small immedi- 
ate way. Large views were beyond his vision; in 
them he would have lost sense of grasp and actual 
possession. What Lord Carnarvon, his editor, has 
praised as self-control in Chesterfield, was the qual- 
ity fatal to his advancement. 

With all his worldly wisdom he was not far-sighted. 
He understood human nature in its ordinary mo- 
tives ; he even saw, what few men of his time saw 



2l6 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

better, that France was on the verge of a Revolution 
which would shake her from foundation stone to 
centre ; but more often there was a strange limit to 
his range. Johnson's famous letter illustrates the 
fact in one way, and the son, to whose education he 
gave such attention, illustrates it in another. His 
confidence in the character of this commonplace son 
indicated singular absence of insight; the faith he 
had in his godson was not less singular. 

Chesterfield's life was not happy. In his scheme, 
contests for high stakes were conspicuous, and he 
often lost. When old age came he was a disap- 
pointed man. Few pictures, as has been pointed out, 
are more saddening, few offer a better theme for the 
moralist than this aged worldling in the splendour of 
his lonely home awaiting the arrival of his dead 
son's widow and children. Well might he say he 
was " extremely weary of this silly world." Silly 
the world doubtless did seem to one who had taken 
such coldly selfish views of its opportunities and of 
a man's duties in it. 

Lord Carnarvon has attributed the disparaging 
popular estimates of Chesterfield in part to the fact 
that in the world of literature, where his rank and 
title counted for comparatively so little, he had the 
misfortune " to incur the enmity of three men whose 
writings have had extraordinary currency, and one 
of them extraordinary authority " — Horace Walpole, 
Lord Hervey, and Dr. Johnson — all of whom have 
said "the bitterest things of him that wit and sar- 



CHESTERFIELD 21 J 

casm and intellectual power could devise." There 
is something of truth in the observation, at least in 
the case of Dr. Johnson, for the story of the Dic- 
tionary will live with Johnson's name ; but too much 
cannot be inferred from it. Sarcasm will not sur- 
vive as a force for a hundred years unless well de- 
served. Most men have had enemies; most public 
ones have been subjects of the bitterest word attacks, 
and yet those who deserved them not have easily out- 
lived them. Chesterfield has not outlived them be- 
cause, with all their exaggeration, they had truth for 
basis. There may have been extenuating circum- 
stances in the case of the Dictionary, but Chester- 
field was not a man to give Johnson offence, had 
he been able to discover Johnson's real position in 
the world of thought and power. Worldly wisdom 
alone would have saved him. 

In his letters Chesterfield discloses himself. 
Therein were written down the things he actually 
thought and believed. Bad as some of these things 
were, they have enjoyed more than a century of life 
because truth and not falsehood lay in them. We 
value Chesterfield's letters for very much the same 
reason that we value the diary of Pepys : the man is 
there, naked and not ashamed. 

The artistic value of the letters offers by no means 
the slightest claim to appreciation of them. A man 
who could write such charming prose in personal 
letters to a son, possessed a mind highly endowed. 
A rare intelligence marks every sentence, with artistic 



2l8 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

understanding of the force and meaning of words. 
Many are crowded with wisdom fit for all times and 
men in all stations. The misfortune is that along 
with all this there exists so much that is unwhole- 
some. A sordid mind is often seen at work, with 
an eye for the main chance, and a desire for the 
success we call worldly. 

When a few years ago a second and new collec- 
tion of Chesterfield's Letters appeared, they in many 
ways recalled the more familiar collection. There 
were seen the same charm of diction, the same ex- 
quisite but depressing worldliness, the same faith in 
mere manners as a road to success, the same elabo- 
rate patience and unwearied devotion to an unworthy 
object. Chesterfield had now become an old man, 
with ambition dead in his heart, and his life certain 
not to last long. Sorrows and disappointments that 
strike vital parts had come to him. The time surely 
was at hand when we might hope to see the man as 
his better nature was. 

Chesterfield wrote the first of these new letters in 
1761 and the last in 1770; George III. had ascended 
the English throne a year before the first date ; Ches- 
terfield died a year after the latter. His natural son's 
death preceded his own, and Chesterfield had been 
many years out of office. Reflections on his career 
in office scarcely afforded him better satisfaction than 
reflections on his domestic life. Marriage had not 
been a source of happiness. He and his wife loved 
each other not more the older they became. Except 



CHESTERFIELD 219 

for the natural child who was to disappoint him, he 
had been childless. His letters to that natural son 
had been published by the widow of that son without 
permission from Chesterfield. He had come to be 
talked about for acts of his life which he thought 
least worthy of public attention. 

The new letters are like the old ones save for the 
immorality. Chesterfield's altered attitude came of 
old age. The sins of his youth must have been suf- 
ficiently hateful in his remembrance. Lord Car- 
narvon does not overstate the truth when he ventures 
the opinion that "private sorrows, and public dis- 
appointments, and the heavy hand of age, and, still 
more, the natural kindliness of temper which had 
been concealed under the polish of society, had led 
him in the sunset of life to a somewhat different 
estimate of right and wrong from that which he 
once possessed." 

When the first of the new letters were written 
Chesterfield's godson was a mere child, just able to 
write his first letters ; when the last were penned he 
was a man grown. Chesterfield flattered himself that 
the earldom would acquire new lustre from his suc- 
cessor. Never did father show greater zeal or more 
disinterested devotion to make a young man wise, 
witty, and accomplished. He sent him presents in 
money, and commended his every good act and every 
good report he heard of him ; directed him in small 
matters of personal behaviour ; wrote him letters in 
French ; sent him to school (to the famous, or rather 



220 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

infamous, as he afterward became, Dr. Dodd), " and 
manifested unremitting interest in the character and 
progress of all his studies. 

It is a melancholy thought that the young man 
never even approached a realization of Chesterfield's 
hopes. He must have been an uncommonly stupid 
boy, while as a man, if not stupid, he was unquestion- 
ably commonplace and uninteresting. Mme. d' Arblay 
thought in 1790 that Chesterfield "would blush to 
behold his successor." " He has as little breeding," 
said she, "as any man I ever met with." The best 
that Lord Carnarvon could say for him was that he 
pleased George III. as Master of the Horse, and had 
accuracy and method enough to keep a diary and a 
weather record. He says plainly that the utmost 
word possible for him is that he " was a sensible and 
kindly if rather commonplace man, whose life was 
the absolute opposite to that of his godfather, and 
whose mental qualities were eclipsed by the brilliant 
memories of his predecessor." The result illustrates, 
as if the irony of it had come from design, the fatal 
defect in Chesterfield's whole scheme of life — his 
overestimate of the value of the outsides of things. 
He had strange inability to see what things were real 
and what were not. 

Some of this wise old man's advice to his godson, 
whose ambition never rose much above the pleasures 
of a country gentleman's life, redeem Chesterfield at 
times from the charge of unrepentant worldliness. 
He rises here almost into the region of the moralist. 






CHESTERFIELD 221 

One comes across passages which make him half 
suspect there was something noble in the system 
of Chesterfield, after all. It certainly is not the 
Chesterfield of popular acceptation who composed 
the following sentence : — 

" Let us, then, not only scatter benefits, but even 
strew flowers for our fellow-travellers in the rugged 
ways of this wretched world." 

Nor is it that kind of man who wrote these : — 

" Your duty to man is very short and clear ; it is 
only to do to him whatever you would be willing 
that he should do to you. And remember in all 
the business of your life to ask your conscience this 
question, Should I be willing that this should be 
done to me ? If your conscience, which will always 
tell you truth, answers no, do not do that thing. 
Observe these rules, and you will be happy in this 
world and still happier in the next." 

" Carefully avoid all affectation either of mind or 
body. It is a very true and a very trite observation 
that no man is ridiculous for being what he really is, 
but for affecting to be what he is not. No man is 
awkward by nature, but by affecting to be genteel, 
and I have known many a man of common sense 
pass generally for a fool because he affected a degree 
of wit that God had denied him. A ploughman is by 
no means awkward in the exercise of his trade, but 
would be exceedingly ridiculous if he attempted the 
airs and graces of a man of fashion." 

" What is commonly called in the world a man or 



222 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

a woman of spirit are the two most detestable and 
most dangerous animals that inhabit it. They are 
strong-headed, captious, jealous, offended without 
reason, and offending with as little. The man of 
spirit has immediate recourse to his sword, and the 
woman of spirit to her tongue, and it is hard to say 
which of the two is the most mischievous weapon." 

" Speak to the King with full as little concern 
(though with more respect) as you would to your 
equals. This is the distinguishing characteristic of 
a gentleman and a man of the world." 

Elsewhere he explains that by " low company " he 
does not mean " people of low birth, for birth goes 
for nothing with me, nor I hope with you." The 
company to which he referred was " obscure, insig- 
nificant people, unknown and unseen in the polite 
part of the world, and distinguished by no one par- 
ticular merit or talent, unless perhaps by soaking 
and sotting out their evenings." 

Repeatedly he reminded the youth of the impor- 
tance of his bearing, and we infer with good reason 
that there was need for it. Occasionally in these 
passages his wit comes to the surface with its old 
polish, as in the following : — 

" A gentleman's air in walking, sitting, and stand- 
ing is one of those important little things which must 
be carefully attended to, for little things only please 
little minds, and the majority of little minds is very 
great." 

" You have an odious trick of not looking people 



CHESTERFIELD 223 

in the face who speak to you or whom you speak to. 
This is a most shocking trick, and implies guilt, fear, 
or inattention, and you must absolutely be cured of 
it, or nobody will love you." 

" That silly article of dress is no trifle. Never be 
the first nor the last in the fashion. Wear as fine 
clothes as those of your rank commonly do, and 
rather better than worse, and when you are well 
dressed once a day do not seem to know that you 
have any clothes on at all, but let your carriage and 
motion be as easy as they would be in your night 
gowns." 

" Let your address when you first come into any 
company be modest, but without the least bashful- 
ness or sheepishness, steady without impudence, and 
as unembarrassed as if you were in your own room. 
This is a difficult point to hit, and therefore de- 
serves great attention; nothing but a long usage 
of the world and in the best company can possibly 
give it." 



XII 

LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY 

Lord Herbert's autobiography has long been 
famous with bibliophiles. Mr. Swinburne has included 
it in a list of the hundred greatest books. Lord 
Herbert is altogether unknown to general readers. 
Heretofore, as Sidney Lee has pointed out, the work 
has been taken as a literary curiosity, interesting 
solely to bookish men. First printed by Horace 
Walpole at his Strawberry Hill press after it had 
delighted private companies when read aloud from 
the manuscript, it has since been several times re- 
printed, though never with that frequency which 
would entitle one to say it had passed into general 
circulation. 

Mr. Lee has made a scholarly and exhaustive 
investigation of Lord Herbert's life in the his- 
torical spirit; the full fruits of his labours have 
been attractively set forth in a long essay on Lord 
Herbert's character, an extremely interesting con- 
tinuation of his life from the point where the autobi- 
ography leaves off, an appendix containing numerous 
letters, documents, and extended notes, and finally in 
a series of foot-notes at once helpful, corrective, and 
entertaining. To have done so much means patient, 

224 



LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY 225 

dreary research, such as only those appreciate who 
have attempted. His reward will probably be wholly 
inadequate to the merits of the performance. For 
the most part, it will consist purely of the thanks of 
every buyer of his edition and of his own conscious- 
ness of having made a substantial contribution to 
literary history and the study of human nature. 

Lord Herbert, from the strictly human point of 
view, is about as curious, not to say amazing, a 
character as books afford. There is no question that 
he was possessed of mental powers entirely out of 
the common. Ben Jonson wrote some compliment- 
ary lines about him, which, though filled with the 
exaggeration usual in the seventeenth century, dis- 
close the eminence to which Lord Herbert's intel- 
lectual faculties had raised him in the minds of his 
contemporaries. His writings on philosophical sub- 
jects interested Descartes, who spoke of them with 
respect. To this day they awaken esteem from all 
who look into them. Mr. Lee is cordial and 
unequivocal in praise of them. As a man who 
anticipated great opinions, Lord Herbert stands 
apart; some of the opinions first advanced by him 
had two centuries to wait before the great world 
came round to them. He has been likened, in cer- 
tain senses, to Lord Bacon, and this without irrever- 
ence : he accepted no man's judgment in place of his 
own ; acknowledged contemporary authorities he had 
sufficient originality and courage to pass by. 

As a man to be likened intellectually unto Bacon, 
Q 



226 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

the opportunity ends here. While it was not true of 
him, as of Bacon, that he was the wisest and brightest 
of his fellows, it was probably still more true of him 
than of his great contemporary, that he was the 
"meanest of mankind." Perhaps meanness is not 
exactly the word for Lord Herbert, but in its strict 
and narrow sense it falls not far short of it. For 
human vanity of the prodigious and unconscious 
kind, commend a seeker to his autobiography. 
Vainglorious is the word for its every page. Another 
word is stark worldliness. Lord Herbert lived in the 
age of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, it is true, but scarcely 
any man, intellectually endowed as he was, ever set so 
high a value on purely worldly things. 

It is worldly triumphs alone that Lord Herbert 
records in that book. He is proud of nothing so 
much as of his face and figure, his great conquests 
among women, the empty compliments paid him in 
foreign lands, and the bumptious promptness with 
which he challenges a man to " fight with me " — and 
yet never fights. During the heyday of his man- 
hood, he appears to have had considerable reputation 
for soldierly qualities and fidelity to his king. But 
when the first severe test came along, at the outbreak 
of the civil war, he showed the white feather at the 
first demand upon him. Pitiable to an extreme is the 
picture of Lord Herbert's last days. One can easily 
understand how every friend of the Stuarts and of 
the cause of kings could echo from his heart the 
name applied to him of " the black Lord Herbert." 



LORD HERBERT OF CHEREURY 227 

That Lord Herbert was vain beyond what most 
men understand as vanity, the mere fact that he 
wrote this vainglorious book, and in his will gave 
directions for its publication, sufficiently shows. He 
is prouder of the achievements recorded here than of 
all he ever did for science and philosophy ; these he 
barely mentions, while incidents in his life which 
most men would have blushed to relate, and would 
have threatened to assault others for relating, Lord 
Herbert set down as creditable performances ; by 
them he hoped his descendants and posterity in 
general would remember, extol, and respect him. 

There is evidence on every page of the work that 
Lord Herbert was not a truthful man. If he does 
not lie in direct Anglo-Saxon way, he does actually 
and constantly prevaricate by the suppression of 
essential facts and by a free indulgence in those per- 
versions that come of prejudice and selfish feeling. 
Mr. Lee convicts him of many offences on this score, 
one of the most characteristic being that, in an ac- 
count of his ancestors, he fails to mention that two 
of them, whose prowess he especially records, had 
their heads cut off. Lord Herbert protests, however, 
that he is a man of truth, and that his natural disposi- 
tion and inclinations are contrary to falsehood. " I 
can affirm to all the world truly," he says, " that from 
my infancy to this hour I told not willingly anything 
that was false, my soul naturally having an antipathy 
to lying and deceit." 

In forgiveness, also, he believed himself to be an 



228 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

exceptional man. He certainly had a heavy enough 
weight of offences to be forgiven for, from unblush- 
ing and carefully recorded conjugal infidelity to 
treason to Charles I., to whose cause, according to 
all human if not all divine rules of honour and grati- 
tude, he should have adhered. Of his capacity for 
forgiveness Lord Herbert says : " And certainly for- 
giveness will be proper, in which kind I am confident 
no man of my time has exceeded me ; for though 
when my honour hath been engaged no man hath ever 
been more forward to hazard his life, yet when, with 
my honour, I could forgive, I never used revenge, as 
leaving it always to God, who, the less I punish mine 
enemies, will conflict so much the more punishment 
on them." On which passage Walpole tersely re- 
marked, " Is it forgiveness to remit a punishment 
on the hope of it being doubled ? " 

Lord Herbert believed several curious things about 
himself, from the yarn of a tailor that he had grown 
taller after he reached middle life to the compliments 
of servants that his soiled clothes were sweet. An- 
other belief was that he had a pulse on the crown of 
his head. He was conscious that he possessed great 
knowledge of drugs, and professed to have cured 
invalids who had been declared incurable. When he 
travelled through France and Italy, he swallowed so 
easily and digested to such curious purpose the for- 
mal compliments paid him at first meetings, that he 
appears really to have believed his fame as a courtier 
and soldier was Continental. 



LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY 229 

A strong light is shed on this feature of his vanity 
in the fact that, when he became the English Ambas- 
sador to France, the banker to whom he applied for 
a letter of credit, and whom his predecessor had dealt 
with, had never heard of him; in other words, the 
man who believed his name famous in the capitals of 
Europe was unknown to a prominent money-lender 
in the capital city, where he had arrived as an Am- 
bassador. While staying in France in the time of 
Henry IV. he attended several balls, " in all which it 
pleased the Queen publicly to place me next to her 
chair, not without the wonder of some and the envy 
of another who was wont to have that favour." He 
returned from abroad, greatly elated at the triumphal 
progress he appears to think he had made, and, says 
he, "was in great esteem both in court and city, 
many of the greatest desiring my company." He 
obviously accepted these honours as tributes to his 
personal worth, rather than his official station. 

As the reader journeys through Lord Herbert's 
250 pages he meets with challenges " to fight with 
me" on about every twentieth page. With the most 
amusing self-satisfaction he details the full story of 
these affairs, thinking himself a very paragon of 
knightly valour. That the most of his challenges 
were absurd, even for that age, when duelling had 
again become common, goes without saying. His 
own records show what his friends thought of some 
of them. Perhaps the absurdest challenge he ever 
sent went to a blundering French magistrate who had 



230 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

sent him to jail. While Ambassador to France, he 
had a stormy interview with one of the King's favour- 
ites and afterward proposed to send him a challenge, 
protesting again and again to James I. that he was 
ready to make good all he had said, with his sword. 
He once suspected his house was attacked by rob- 
bers. Sword in hand and undressed he "ran out, 
opened the doors suddenly, and charged ten or 
twelve of them with that fury that they ran away, 
some throwing away their halberds, others hustling 
their fellows to make them go faster." 

While in Paris some of his attendants had a quar- 
rel in the street, and were driven back within the 
gates of his house by "great multitudes." Seeing 
this from a window, Lord Herbert says he " ran out 
with his sword, which the people no sooner saw but 
they fled again as fast as ever they entered." Nar- 
ratives like these remind one of Thackeray's "Tre- 
mendous Adventures of Major Gahagan." It was 
men like Lord Herbert whose follies and vanities 
gave Cervantes his immortal opportunity. He pro- 
tests that he always fought for others, challenging 
men who had injured ladies and gentlemen. " I 
never had a quarrel with man for my own sake," he 
says, and " never without occasion quarrelled with 
anybody." Moreover, " as little did anybody attempt 
to give me offence, as having as clear a reputation 
for courage as whosoever of my time." 

For a man so invincible in single combat as Lord 
Herbert believed himself to be, and yet who appears 



LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY 23 1 

never to have fought one duel strictly so to be called 
(although he found it necessary to defend himself on 
one occasion from an attack in an open place at 
Whitehall made by an injured husband, who had 
threatened to shoot him at sight), the closing scenes 
of his life were pitiable and ignominious enough. As 
Ambassador in Paris he had lived with ostentatious 
extravagance, far exceeding the limits, not only of his 
salary, but of his private income. The result was 
debts too heavy to pay. He asked help from the 
state, and constantly made his appearance at court 
in the character of petitioner for money. 

His elevation to the peerage — an honour not nig- 
gardly conferred in those times — was about the 
only result of childish and persistent pleadings. Ex- 
cept for the help of the Duke of Buckingham 
(George Villiers) he might not have received even 
that. When Buckingham was assassinated, the sole 
prospect he had of gaining anything else completely 
vanished. His son, meanwhile, had emulated his ex- 
ample by living riotously and impoverishing him ; his 
wife, to whose happiness he appears to have made 
slight contributions, had died ; his own health was fail- 
ing, and, the first notes of the civil war (deaf as Lord 
Herbert's ears were to the loudest of them) were 
beginning to unsettle the political future of England. 

Lord Herbert had no political foresight whatever. 
Not the least curious instance of this in the auto- 
biography is his failure altogether to mention Riche- 
lieu, who during Herbert's career as Ambassador had 



232 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

become a commanding and foremost figure. This 
failure was entirely consistent with his habit of see- 
ing the outsides and ornamental parts of things only. 
There is no evidence that Lord Herbert realized 
the meaning of the civil war in England, or had 
any thought for the issue except as it affected his 
own fortune and personal comfort. With his son, 
his grandson, and a brother fighting for the throne 
of the Stuarts, and with lifelong obligations and 
associations binding him to the same cause, he sur- 
rendered without resistance his stronghold, Mont- 
gomery Castle, to the Parliamentary forces on terms 
that secured his own safety and personal ease. He 
afterward made formal submission to Parliament, 
actually petitioned it for money, and at last secured 
a personal allowance of .£20 a week. This was the 
sort of spirit that remained after Parliament had sent 
him to the Tower, and he had been released only 
when making a handsome apology for his offence. 

So inglorious an end for one who professed himself 
one of the most courageous, valiant, and honourable 
men of his time is sufficiently sickening and sadden- 
ing for any one who would take the better view of 
human nature. It is almost incredible that he shared 
a common parentage with George Herbert, the poet, 
who in his own lifetime was regarded almost as a 
saint by his Salisbury neighbours. That he paid 
dearly in his last years for the follies and sins of early 
life is really a matter for consolation, though Mr. 
Lee seems to doubt if his actual suffering was great, 
so consuming was his vanity. 



XIII 

GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 

The appearance of three octavo volumes devoted 
to writings by Edward Gibbon, in large part before 
unpublished, was well esteemed in the wisest circles 
the literary event of most importance during that 
recent year when they were published ; but they 
were not talked about ; nor were they much read. 
Probably not more than a thousand persons in this 
country have yet seen them. No American publisher 
has reprinted them ; nor is one likely to do so. But 
nowhere else could we find among the books of that 
year one of more vital interest to real literature, 
abounding, as the volumes do, in a large mass of new 
matter pertaining to the author of one of the greatest 
books written since time began. 

It is true that parts of these volumes have seen 
the light before, but the manner in which they saw 
it, especially in the case of the autobiography, was 
altogether exceptional, if not wholly unprecedented. 
The autobiography which we were already familiar 
with, one of the most famous in our language, while 
the work of Gibbon's hand, is not his work as he pro- 
duced it. Gibbon wrote not one autobiography but 
seven, and the one we have always known, published 

233 



234 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

by the first Lord Sheffield, was a piece of literary 
carpentry ; it had been constructed by Lord Sheffield 
out of the seven that Gibbon wrote. 

This extraordinary fact was due to editorial 
methods that were tolerated in an earlier and easier 
time. While they explain the act, they in no way 
excuse it. Granting it was proper for Lord Sheffield 
to use such methods at all, he employed them well ; 
but why should he not have done the thing his grand- 
son so recently did — print the whole seven as Gib- 
bon left them ? We may say such a publication 
would have abounded in repetitions and that there 
would have been wanting unity and order, but Gib- 
bon's autobiographical writings we should then have 
had just as Gibbon produced them — not as Lord 
Sheffield shuffled them about and patched them 
together. Lord Sheffield's conduct was perhaps not 
more unwarranted than was John Wilson Croker's 
with Boswell. But the one act, as well as the other, 
will never be pardoned in any court where literary 
ethics are respected. 

Why Gibbon wrote seven autobiographies and left 
none of them completed must remain unexplained. 
That he took great pains with all of them is clear 
enough. Gibbon was by nature disposed to indolence, 
but once he set about a task, whether to write the 
" Decline and Fall," or to write a letter, he gave to 
the work a master's hand. The very fact that he 
wrote seven autobiographies shows the care he 
bestowed upon his work, the solicitude he had for 



GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 235 

it and his desire to put his best expression into it. 
There are chapters in the " Decline and Fall " which 
were written with probably less care, so sure was his 
knowledge of Rome, so completely had the chapters 
been thought out. In the later volumes of this his- 
tory he did not always resort to any re-writing. It is 
well known that he had pride in the fact that the 
work was published after none save himself and the 
printer had read the manuscript. 

Gibbon wrote the autobiographies with deliberate 
intention that at least one of them should be published. 
Had he lived longer (and he had carefully computed 
that, in the ordinary course of nature, he had several 
years yet to his account) he would unquestionably 
have produced a final version compounded of the 
seven. Lord Sheffield doubtless knew this, but for 
him to do what Gibbon intended to do was clearly a 
straining of the duties of friendship. Friendship 
might bear the strain, but literature could not. 

The charm that lies in Gibbon's story of his own 
life rests not in any striking events chronicled. He 
chronicles none, for there was none to chronicle. 
Gibbon's life was lost in his work. He at one time 
had ambition to make a mark in Parliament, but it 
was short-lived. He saw early, and saw clearly, that 
no road to eminence was open to him in that council 
chamber. Doubtless he would never have sought 
success there at all had he known the fame which 
the " Decline and Fall " would bring him. 

Gibbon in his letters we see in a light that in many 



236 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

ways essentially readjusts former estimates of his 
personality. For one thing he was not the prig he 
has sometimes been represented to have been. A 
genuine human heart beat beneath the gorgeous 
waistcoat he wore. He was capable of an intense 
and lifelong friendship, and he had distinct sense 
of humour. Through long years he toiled terribly, 
but he could entertain friends, play at cards, drink 
late and deep, and endure the gout with the fortitude 
of a true-born Englishman. If he had his foibles, 
and among them vanity, he had conspicuous virtues 
— a sound heart, a strong sense of duty, a steadfast 
soul. 

We may condemn Lord Sheffield's act of amalga- 
mation. Were such an act performed in our times, 
we should condemn it without reserve. But the end 
of the eighteenth century had not the code of literary 
ethics that we have now. Jared Sparks, with a high 
hand, was yet to edit Washington, and Boswell was to 
be drawn and quartered by Croker. Time, however, 
brings its revenges. As Sparks has had his Ford 
and Croker his Hill, so has the first Lord Sheffield 
had his grandson, the third and present lord. 

These new letters were almost exclusively ad- 
dressed to Gibbon's father, his stepmother, and his 
friend, Lord Sheffield. Character shines in them 
all. As a son he was constantly dutiful, devoted, 
obedient, sympathetic. His stepmother outlived him. 
Through many years, however, when the care of a 
large estate, heavily encumbered and unproductive, 






GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 237 

gave him interminable trouble, his kindness to her, 
his solicitude, affection, and honourable dealings with 
her, were unbroken. With Lord Sheffield he stood 
in terms of close intimacy ; it was a fraternal rela- 
tion, charming alike in its steadfastness and its good- 
fellowship. Indeed, as Gibbon was an author with 
one book, so he seems to have been a man with one 
friend. 

Gibbon's life in London kept him in the great 
social and political world, but of that experience the 
sole evidence here presented is contained in letters 
to this friend and to his stepmother. Gibbon knew 
and admired Burke and Fox, and Pitt and Sheridan 
he must have met almost daily ; but they pass before 
the reader as scarcely more than names. His letters 
abound in allusions to smaller matters that came 
closer to his heart — his stepmother's welfare, his 
father's estate, Lord Sheffield's home and family, 
his own house, and his little pleasures. 

But with all that is disclosed respecting charac- 
ter, the letters leave untold a far greater story in 
Gibbon's life — the story of the means by which he 
wrote his history. Charmed as we may be with 
reading them, we close the book with a sigh of 
regret that the mystery of a great writer's work 
remains a mystery still. The letters teach us noth- 
ing. The immortal book he was writing seldom ever 
was referred to. Page after page may be read in 
the very years when he is known to have been deep 
in toil, without a word set down pertaining to it. 



238 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

In 1 764 he wrote from Florence to his stepmother, 
" I have never lost sight of the undertaking I laid 
the foundation of at Lausanne, and I do not despair 
of being able one day to produce something by way of 
a description of ancient Italy which may be of some 
use to the public and of some credit to myself — " 
a passage which recalls the famous one in the 
autobiography referring to the project he formed 
while musing at Rome among the ruins of the 
Capitol. Nine years later he wrote again, " I am 
just at present engaged in a great historical work, no 
less than a history of the decline and fall of the 
Roman Empire, with the first volume of which I may 
very possibly oppress the public next winter." 

In a correspondence that was frequent with his 
stepmother, these are almost the sole allusions he 
makes to a work into which his whole life was put. 
To his friend, Lord Sheffield, he wrote, " I am just 
now in the most busy moment of my life ; nor is it 
so small a work as you may imagine to destroy a 
great empire." In this offhand, almost playful way 
did Gibbon refer to his tremendous labours. Letter 
after letter follows, with seldom any reference to his 
studies. Finally, in 1779, he wrote: " My second 
volume advances, and I hope will be finished within 
the ensuing year. You were right as to the benefit 
I derived from the first ; under the pressure of vari- 
ous difficulties it proved a seasonable and useful 
friend ; but if it supported, it did not enrich its 
author." After he had gone to Lausanne as his final 



GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 239 

residence he wrote to his stepmother : " My private 
life is a gentle and not unpleasing continuation of my 
old labours, and I am again involved, as I shall be for 
some years, in the decline and fall of the Roman 
Empire. Some fame, some profit, and the assurance 
of daily amusement encourage me to persist." 

Was ever a great author more silent about his own 
work? Vain as Gibbon may have been in some 
personal matters, none of the vanity of an author 
was shown in his correspondence. His intimacy 
with Sheffield was of the closest kind, and yet we 
find Sheffield reproaching him with having permitted 
the fact that he was producing a continuation of the 
history to reach the ears of his friends through the 
newspapers. Sheffield could not at first believe 
the news. He accepted the information only when 
its truth was confirmed by Gibbon's London publisher. 

One sees here a part of that magnificent reserve 
which forms at once the charm, the glory, and the 
effective force of the history itself. Never did an 
author write a book and leave behind fewer evidences 
of his toil; never was workman so absolutely un- 
known by his chips. Gibbon was the most self- 
centred of authors. Consummate literary artist that 
he was, he sought from others none of that sympathy 
which artists commonly value so much and often need 
so much. Here, again, we see the Roman strength 
of the man. His history moves forward as the work 
of a master sure of every step. We may be certain 
he was wholly unabashed when a royal duke, with 



240 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

profanity in his mouth, reproached him with " always 
scribbling, scribbling, scribbling." And when Horace 
Walpole regretted to his face that "so clever an 
author should write on so dull a subject," we can 
feel the magnificent reserve with which Gibbon mod- 
estly ventured to say such a history " had never been 
put together before." Walpole, in his own account 
of this conversation, contemptuously remarks that 
Gibbon, with his " button mouth " screwed up, wanted 
to say the history " had never been put together 
before so well," but, instead of the final word, 
"gulped it." A wiser public than Walpole wrote 
for has long since opened the door and bowed Wal- 
pole out of court. 

Gibbon has declared that " few works of merit and 
importance have been created either in a garret or a 
palace." The remark has occasioned surprise, since 
history abounds in illustrations to the contrary — for 
example, Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith in the one in- 
stance, Caesar and Marcus Aurelius in the other. 
Gibbon himself had neither poverty nor riches ; but 
he had an encumbrance which to most men, and above 
all to most authors, would have been a greater hin- 
drance than either — an embarrassed, poorly produc- 
tive estate, out of which his stepmother was to 
be supported and his own position in the world 
maintained. 

His correspondence is burdened with the affairs of 
this property from his youth down to his latest days. 
There were interminable annoyances, failures to col- 



GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 24 1 

lect rents, failures to effect sales, trouble with the 
holders of mortgages, and debts accumulating. Had 
Gibbon dwelt in a garret, his life must have run its 
course in less troubled waters. But he was never 
actually unhappy; indeed, he often proclaimed his 
happiness. Again and again he was thankful that 
he had a mind capable of looking on the bright sides 
of things. 

There is real truth, however, in Gibbon's remark, 
when applied to historical writing — at least in so far 
as the remark relates to poverty. Men dependent 
on their labour for support cannot well write history. 
Froude managed to do it, but with sore trial and 
much distress. Most historians, like Gibbon, have 
had some certainty as to income. Macaulay, Free- 
man, Parkman, Prescott, all had private means. The 
novelist may be a poor man, for if his books succeed 
and he writes enough of them, he will be sure of an 
income on which to live. The historian, unlike the 
novelist, cannot write a book within six months or a 
year and repeat the achievement indefinitely. He 
must spend many years or a whole lifetime at the 
task, and then he may get scant financial reward 
when his labour is done and old age is upon him. 

In a passage already quoted, Gibbon remarks that 
his book, "if it supported, did not enrich its author." 
His emoluments must have been pitifully small from 
that book when we remember the years he gave to 
his task and the cost of his library. Had he lived to 
know what success in a succeeding generation Scott 



242 OUR LITERARY DELUGE 

was to win for writing another kind of history, and 
Byron for celebrating in song the land Gibbon cele- 
brated in prose, the contrast might well have evoked 
from him some of those interesting philosophical 
reflections in which his writings abound. 

No monument, except at his grave, has been raised 
to Gibbon's memory. Should a monument ever be 
set up, its most fitting promoters would be profes- 
sional men of letters. Never lived an author who 
bestowed a like renown upon their calling and was in 
like degree loyal to it. Carlyle has written finely of 
the fame of those who write great books as a thing 
surpassing other fame; but Gibbon did more than 
observe this fact and record it: he was sincerely 
proud of it. There cannot be any question that 
when he cited the family of Confucius as " the most 
illustrious in the world," he set down what he believed 
to be a simple truth. Descent, to his mind, was more 
honourable when it came from a great writer than 
when it came from a great prince. He would have 
valued descent from Chaucer as a nobler heritage 
than descent from the Norman William. There are 
passages in Gibbon's life which do not make us think 
of him as a hero. When he " sighed as a lover and 
obeyed as a son," he played no heroic part. But in 
his life as an author, in his domestic conduct, and in 
his friendships the hero was writ large all through 
Gibbon's life. 

Alongside that history a crowd of famous works 
produced in Gibbon's time, as well as before and 



GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 243 

since his time, fade into the second or even lesser 
rank. Surely it is not Samuel Johnson, it is not 
Hume, not Macaulay, Greene, or Carlyle, who has 
written a book comparable with it either in intrinsic 
and permanent worth, in splendour of achievement, or 
in value to mankind. When Byron called it a bridge 
from the ancient world to the modern he character- 
ized it in terms singularly fit and still final. Gibbon 
reared an enduring edifice; he crossed a vast and 
unknown chasm. A world dead to men's knowledge 
was made to live once more. More than a century 
has passed since Gibbon wrote. Not all the learning 
men have since acquired, not all the attacks church- 
men have directed against certain of his chapters, 
have dislodged the book from its place as a book for 
all time. 

The greatest personal lesson taught by Gibbon is 
the supreme importance of doing with all one's power 
some one thing well worth doing. It is the lesson of 
consecration to a good object and the lesson of fixity 
of purpose. Gibbon practically did nothing except 
write that book. He sat in two Parliaments, but he 
made no mark there, finding his talents not well 
employed. He was a member of the Board of Trade ; 
but he was attracted to the place, not by its work, 
but by its salary. For the rest there is nothing to 
record except the care of an embarrassed estate and 
a lifelong friendship. 

The historian of the later days of the Roman Em- 
pire reared a literary edifice (an architectural term is 



244 0UR LITERARY DELUGE 

the word for that book) which seems certain of main- 
taining its supremacy over the empire of the human 
mind much as Rome herself has maintained suprem- 
acy. The solidity of some Roman structure is seen 
in that history. We behold the nobility of Roman 
conception and the charm of Roman structural 
strength. Gibbon was born an Englishman and edu- 
cated a French Swiss, but he seems rather a product 
of the civilization whose decay he recorded — that 
civilization founded in character, reared in intelli- 
gence, and so supreme in efficiency as to have re- 
tained the awe-struck wonder of all nations since. 

This isolation of the man as a workman has found 
its counterpart in the isolation of his book — a monu- 
mental piece of writing, set in a place apart, the most 
famous in its kind that a century and more have seen, 
and the one that seems most certain of long life 
among generations yet to live. We can easily moral- 
ize over all this concentration of effort and the result- 
ant renown to the author. That Gibbon seriously 
expected such fame as now attends his name we can- 
not assume. Success he had in his own day, it is 
true, and a success in which he must have found 
great joy; but it scarcely presaged the wide esteem 
that has followed in its train. 

Gibbon unquestionably was ambitious. He bore 
his want of success in Parliament with the fortitude 
that he showed in the presence of all other disap- 
pointments (and he had his share of them — in love, 
income, and health) ; but this was at a time when his 



GIBBON'S SOLITARY GRANDEUR 245 

book had pointed out the road to other eminence. 
Here, doubtless, lay the source of Gibbon's consola- 
tion. When, finally, the book was completed, and 
Sheridan had mentioned it in his speech at the trial 
of Warren Hastings, Gibbon must have dimly fore- 
seen that to him might after all come a fame wider 
and more lasting than that of princes, statesmen, or 
soldiers — the fame of him who writes a truly great 
book. 

As the Catholic church' continuing the sway of the 
Caesars may live to verify Macaulay's prophecy and 
welcome his New Zealander to a broken arch of 
London Bridge, so may Gibbon's work be still hold- 
ing together its empire over the minds of readers 
when that time comes. The world's great poets, 
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, may have longer 
life than he, but where else in literature shall we find 
a name more certain of renown among a very late 
posterity ? Gibbon, as I have said, knew the supreme 
permanence of the highest literary fame over all other 
fame whatsoever. He declared with conscious pride 
that Fielding's " splendid picture of human manners " 
would "outlive the palace of the Escurial and the 
imperial eagle of the house of Austria." Gibbon 
might have envied Pitt his fame, or Fox his (had 
envy been possible to Gibbon's breast), but his own 
fame is destined to longer permanence than theirs. 
He stands apart, alone in his solitary grandeur. 



INDEX 



Academies of Letters, 57-62. 

" Academy, The London," 57, 84. 

Achilles, 120. 

Addison, Joseph, 138, 202. 

Ainger, Alfred, his edition of Lamb, 

73. 74- 

" Albany Argus, The," 37. 

Albany Regency, the, 37. 

Alcott, Louisa M., 93; her devoted 
life, 124, 196. 

Aldus, Manutius, books printed by, 
85, 151, 170. 

Alhambra, the, 118. 

Allen, James Lane, 82. 

Alloway, Burns's birthplace, 38, 198, 
201. 

" American Catalogue, The," 5. 

" American Commonwealth, The," 
22. 

American Library Association, the, 
86-88. 

" An Epistle to Posterity," Mrs. Sher- 
wood's book, 195. 

Appleton, D., & Co., 16. 

Argyll, Duke of, 58. 

Arnold, Matthew, 29. 

Arnold, William H., his collection, 
20, 155 ; profits from, 163. 

Ashburnham, Earl of, his collection, 
166-169. 

Assyria, 117. 

" Athenaeum, The," London, 35. 

Athens, 116. 

Atlanta, Georgia, 87. 

Audubon, John James, his "Jour- 
nals," 46-47, 189. 

Audubon, Maria R., 47. 

Austen, Jane, 13; money received 
from her books, 25 ; her provincial 
life, 126; her knowledge of her 
own powers, 127. 



Authors, rapid production by, 7 ; pe- 
cuniary rewards of, 21, 28; rela- 
tions of, with publishers, 26, 28; 
early struggles of great ones, 29- 
38 ; unknown but widely read ones, 
38-40 ; Academies of, 57-62 ; those 
greater than their books, 122-132; 
incomes needed by, when histo- 
rians, 133-134. 

Authors' Club, the, 41. 

Babylonia, 117. 

Bacon, Lord, 225. 

Bailey, Miss Catherine, 96. 

Bainbridge, Commodore William, 

139- 
Bancroft, George, 133 ; his " History 

of the United States," 141, 142, 172. 
Barrie, James M., 81, 157 ; his " Mar- 
garet Ogilvy," 194. 
Bath, England, 126. 
" Bay Psalm Book, The," 163. 
Bayle, Pierre, 77. 

Beckford, William, his library, 167. 
Beers, Professor Henry A., his views 

of Willis, 97-98, 99, 100, 102. 

Begg, Mrs. , Burns's sister, 205. 

Bennet, Elizabeth, 127. 
Bismarck, Prince, his letters, 189. 
" Black Rock," 24. 
Blackmore, R. D., 58. 
Blashfield, E. H., and Vasari, 147. 
Blashfield, E. W., and Vasari, 147. 
Blessington, Countess of, 7, 98. 
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 155 ; the Val- 

darfer edition of, 167. 
Brinley, George, sale of his library, 

151, 157, 158 ; how he found rare 

books, 161, 169. 
Brunelleschi, Filippo, his dome, 148. 
Brunson, Mrs. , 96. 



247 



248 



INDEX 



" Book Buyer, The," vii. 

Book-plates, collectors of, 153-154. 

Books, contemporary output of, 3 ; 
number published in former times, 
4-5 ; number now in print, 5 ; 
ephemeral nature of many, 5 ; rapid 
production of, 6 ; causes of the out- 
put, 9-12; classes of most pub- 
lished, 15; centres of publishing, 
15-16 ; at auction, 16 ; methods of 
selling, 17-19; authors' returns 
from, 20-28 ; unknown but widely 
read, 38-40 ; immoral ones, 45-47 ; 
advice as to reading, 48-49 ; re- 
views of, 49-56 ; only tribunal for, 
53 ; editing old ones, 63-76 ; me- 
chanical side of, 77-85 ; for chil- 
dren, 77-78 ; sold by subscription, 
78-79; covers for, 81; for sum- 
mer reading, 79, 82-83 ; privately 
printed, 83 ; influence of librarians 
on, 86-93 I neglect of the best, 104- 
105 ; restraint on the output of, 
105-107 ; difficulties librarians have 
with, 107, 108 ; those of power, 108 ; 
reaction against fiction, 109 ; great 
ones that do not go out of fashion, 
115; praise of, 115; the num- 
ber will increase, 116; survive all 
changes, 117; good ones will not 
die, 118; changing fashions in col- 
lecting, 150; demand for Ameri- 
cana, 151, 157; extra illustrated, 
152-153 ; first editions of, 154-157 ; 
second-hand ones, 158, 159 ; values 
in Americana, 162; profits in old 
ones, 160-169; the most costly, 
163 ; discrimination in buying, 156 ; 
men who printed early ones, 170 ; 
of the memoir class, 184-187. 

Booksellers, restoration of their trade, 
18 ; steps for relief of, 19. 

Boone, Daniel, 47. 

Boston, as a former centre of pub- 
lishing, 15; its dislike of Willis, 
101. 

Boswell, James, his life of Johnson, 
12, 64, 184, 189. 

Bradford, William, his press, 158, 175. 



Braybrooke, Lord, his edition of 

Pepys, 207. 
Bressani, Father, 174. 
Bright, Mynors, his edition of Pepys, 

207. 
Bronte, Charlotte, 25 ; her fame, 121, 

131- 

Brooks, Noah, 92. 

Brown, John Carter, his library, 162. 

Browning, Robert, his " Pauline," 
22; his letters and those of Mrs. 
Browning, 46, 189 ; his " Ring and 
the Book," 164. 

Bryant, William Cullen, 191. 

Bryce, James, his " American Com- 
monwealth," 21. 

Buckingham, Duke of, 231. 

Buckle, Henry Thomas, 31. 

Buffalo Public Library, the, 108. 

Bunyan, John, 92. 

Burke, Edmund, 237. 

Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 92. 

Burns, Gilbert, 203. 

Burns, Robert, 12; the Kilmarnock 
edition of his poems, 22, 151, 152; 
payments for his songs, 25; extra 
illustrated, 152; pecuniary returns 
of, 198 ; his immediate popularity, 
199 ; his Edinburgh visit, 199, 200, 
205 ; his homes, 201-205. 

Burns, William, the poet's father, 201. 

Burroughs, John, 92. 

Burton, Robert, his "Anatomy of 
Melancholy," 41, 150. 

Byron, Ada, 69. 

Byron, John, Captain, the poet's 
father, 69. 

Byron, Lord, 12 ; his liking for Burton, 
42, 49 ; latest edition of his works, 
69; a revival of, 70, 71, 115, 120; 
quoted, 140, 154 ; books of his that 
are rare, 157; his letters, 184; a 
cause of memoir writing, 185, 186 ; 
and Gibbon, 242, 243. 

C^sar, Julius, 120, 240. 
Caine, Hall, 17, 22, 39. 
Carlyle, Thomas, 8; and Emerson, 
30; his "Sartor Resartus," 31, 40; 



INDEX 



249 



advice by, as to reading, 48, 49; 
on Shakespeare, 60 ; on Washing- 
ton, 69; memoirs of, 186; early 
struggles of, 198 ; his " French 
Revolution," 213, 243. 

Carnarvon, Lord, 215, 220. 

Carnegie, Andrew, 86, 91. 

Century Company, the, 16. 

Cervantes, Miguel de, 117; fame of, 
118, 230. 

Champlin, John D., 92. 

Chapman, George, his translation of 
Homer, 164. 

Charles I., 228. 

Chatterton, Thomas, 191. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 84, 115, 242. 

Chautauqua, education at, 9. 

Chesterfield, Lord, his views of life, 
214 ; failure of, as statesman, 215 ; 
his sad old age, 216 ; his " Letters," 
217-222 ; quoted, 220, 223. 

Chicago, book-publishing in, 15. 

" Childe Harold," 156. 

" Choir Invisible, The," 82. 

Chorley, Henry F., 35. 

" Christian, The," 24. 

Churchill, Winston, 17, 23, 39. 

Cibber, Colley, his " Autobiography," 
184, 186. 

Clarendon, Earl of, his writings, 123- 
124, 133- 

Clarke, Mary Cowden, her "Auto- 
biography," 195. 

Claudian aqueduct, the, 117. 

Clive, Robert, Lord, 60. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 12, 70, 164. 

Collier, Jeremy, 209, 210. 

Concord, Mass., 30; "Old Manse" 
at, 33, 38. 

Condell, Henry, 6or62. 

Cook, Dutton, 8. 

Coolidge, Susan, 92. 

Cooper, Fenimore, 81 ; his want of 
style, 102. 

" Cotter's Saturday Night, The," 205. 

Cowper, William, letters of, 189. 

Craddock, Charles Egbert, 92. 

Crawford, Marion, 24. 

" Crisis, The," 24. 



" Critic, The," vii. 

Croker, John Wilson, his edition of 

Boswell, 234, 236. 
Cromwell, Oliver, 56, 187. 
Croswell, Edwin, 37. 
Curtis, George William, 33, 34. 
" Cushman's Sermon," 164. 
Cuvier, Georges, Baron, 47. 

Dallas, Robert C, 184. 

Dana, John Cotton, 109, no. 

DAnnunzio, Gabrielle, 45. '$ 

Dante, Alighieri, the few who read, 
29 ; his want of contemporary rec- 
ognition, 60, 116, 119, 120; the man 
as great as the author, 182, 245. 

" David Copperfield," 39. 

" David Harum," 106 ; sales of, 24. 

Deane sale, the, 162. 

"Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire, The," 234-235, 238-245. 

Defoe, Daniel, 92. 

Del Sarto, Andrea, 146. 

" Democratic Review, The," 35. 

Department stores, influence of, on 
book trade, 17. 

De Quincey, Thomas, 108. 

" Deserted Village, The," 163. 

De Vinne, Theodore L., 83. 

Dibdin, Thomas F., his heroes, 150; 
sales he celebrated, 155, 167. 

Dickens, Charles, sales of his books, 
24, 92 ; collectors of, 155, 157 ; and 
the common people, 181. 

Dobson, Austin, 58. 

" Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," 32. 

Dodd, Mead & Company, 16, 226. 

Dodge, Mary Mapes, 92. 

Dolet, Etienne, his "Commentary," 
158. 

" Dolliver Romance, The," 32. 

"D'ri and I," 24. 

Dryden, John, 189. 

Du Maurier, George, 17, 22, 24. 

Dunbar, Paul L., 23. 

" Eben Holden," 24. 
Ecclefechan, Carlyle's birthplace, 
38. 



250 



INDEX 



Edinburgh, Scott's home in, 182; 
Burns's visit to, 199. 

Eggleston, Edward, 92. 

Egypt, folk tales from, 13, 117. 

" Elegy written in a Country Church- 
yard, The," 72, 174. 

Eliot, George, 25, 92, 131. 

Eliot, John, his translation of the 
Bible, 157, 158. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 149. 

Ellis, Mrs. , 8. 

Elmendorf, Henry L., 108, 109. 

Elzevirs, the, books printed by, 85, 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8 ; quoted, 
29 ; and Carlyle, 30, 34, 42 ; 
Holmes's life of, 52 ; his " Thren- 
ody," 164. 

" Englishwoman's Love Letters, An," 
24. 

Erasmus, Desiderius, 77. 

Estienne, Robert, 170. 

" Eternal City, The," 24. 

Evelyn, John, his " diary," 184 ; and 
Pepys, 209, 210, 212. 

" Fanshawe," Hawthorne's story, 
32; rarity of, 155, 156, 163-164. 

Farragut, David, the admiral, 139. 

" Faust," 120. 

Fergusson, Robert, 199, 202. 

Ferrier, Dr. , 167. 

Fiction, kinds of popular, 12-13, I 4~ 
15 ; writing of a growing pursuit, 
13 ; rewards for writing, 23-25 ; re- 
duction of output, 24 ; per cent, 109. 

Fielding, Henry, his " Tom Jones," 
78, 115 ; first edition of, 156, 181, 
184; Gibbon's praise of, 245. 

Fiske, John, 92, 175. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, his version of 
Omar, value of first edition of, 119, 
165. 

Florence, 145 ; greatness of, 148. 

Foote, Charles B., his collection, 155. 

Ford., Paul Leicester, his successful 
books, 17, 23 ; " Peter Stirling," 51 ; 
" The True George Washington," 
67. 



Ford, Worthington C, his " Writings 

of Washington," 66-69, 2 3&' 
Forsythe, John, 36. 
Foster, Mrs. Jonathan, 145. 
Foster, William E, his collection of 

" books of power," 108-109. 
Fox, Caroline, her recollections, 195. 
Fox, Charles James, 237, 245. 
Francis, Dr. John W., his " Old New 

York," 153. 
Franklin, Benjamin, his press, 158; 

his autobiography, 186. 
Freeman, Edward A., his history, 

133, 172, 241. 
French Academy, the, 59. 
Frontenac, Louis de Buade, Count, 

173. 

Froude, James Anthony, 68, 172. 

Fuller, Margaret, her place in Ameri- 
can literature, 125-126. 

Galt, John, 7. 

Gardiner, Samuel R., 58. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, life of, by 
his sons, 139-140. 

Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 8. 

George III., 218. 

Germany, number of books pub- 
lished in, 3 ; book fairs in, 4. 

Gettysburg, Lincoln's speech at, 121. 

Gibbon, Edward, 12, 23, 49, 133 ; 
greatest of English historians, 135, 
143 ; and Parkman, 172 ; his auto- 
biography, 184,233-236; his letters, 
236-242; his "Decline and Fall," 
140, 237, 245 ; his pride in author- 
ship, 242; his achievement, 243- 

245. 
" Gideon Giles," 39. 
Gilbert, W. S., 58. 
Gladstone, William E., 58, 190. 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 120, 

148, 175, 190. 
" Golden Treasury, The," 74-76. 
Goldsmith, Oliver, his " Vicar of 

Wakefield," 22, 163, 240. 
Gosse, Edmund, 58 ; his edition of 

Gray, 71-73. 
Grangerites, the, 153. 



INDEX 



251 



Grant, General U. S., 23. 

Gray, Thomas, Gosse's edition of, 
71-73 ; his " Elegy," 174, 184. 

Great Britain, end of three-volume 
novels in, 11; number of books 
published in, 3. 

Great Meadows, battle of, 174. 

Green, John Richard, 117; his his- 
tory of England, 140, 143, 172, 

243. 
Grenville, Thomas, his collection, 

165. 
Grolier Club, the, 83, 85. 
Growoll, A., 5. 
Grundy, Felix, 36. 
Gutenberg Bible, the, enhanced value 

of, 165-166, 169. 

Hallam, Arthur, 75. 

Halsey, Miss Lavantia, dedication 

to, v. 

Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 187, 188. 
Hamilton, Lady (Emma Lyon), 136, 

137- 

Hare, Augustus J. C., 187, 188. 

" Hariot's Virginia," 163. 

Harper & Brothers, 16. 

Harrison, Frederic, advice by, as to 
reading, 48, 49. 

Hastings, Warren, 60. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 8 ; his " Fan- 
shawe," 22; his "Twice-Told 
Tales," 25; late recognition of, 
32-37 ; recognition by best minds, 
35 ; his early writings, 35 ; and the 
critics, 50, 81; and Willis, 103, 
115; income of, from tales, 119; 
collectors of, 155, 156, 163, 198. 

Hay, John, his " Life of Lincoln," 
141, 142. 

Hazlitt, William, 53. 

" Heavenly Twins, The," 106. 

Heber, Richard, 155 ; his books, 166. 

Hector of Troy, 120. 

Helen of Troy, 120. 

Helps, Sir Arthur, 211. 

Heminge, John, 60, 62. 

" Henry Esmond," 39. 

Herbert, George, 232. 



Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 184 ; his 
" Autobiography," 224-232 ; his 
character and public offices, 225- 
226; his vanity, 227-231; his in- 
glorious end, 232. 

Herndon, William H., his " Life of 
Lincoln," 144, 146. 

Heron, Robert, 199. 

Hervey, Lord, 216. 

Hill, George Birkbeck, his services to 
Boswell and Johnson, 64-65, 236. 

Hoe, Robert, 162. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 33; his 
liking for Burton, 42; and Emer- 
son, 52, 93. 

Homer, 29, 120. 

" Honourable Peter Stirling, The," 51. 

Hood, Thomas, 8. 

Hopkins, A. A., and Vasari, 147. 

Horace, the Roman poet, 118. 

Hosack, Dr. , 97. 

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 16. 

Howell, James, his "Letters," 41. 

Howells, William Dean, 39. 

Howitt, Mary, 8. 

Hugo, Victor, his " Letters," 189, 190 ; 
his early life, 192-193. 

Hume, David, 133, 172, 243, 245. 

Hume, Martin, 68. 

Hunt, Leigh, 184. 

" Independent, The," vii. 

" Influence of Sea Power in History, 
The," 135. 

" In Memoriam," 75. 

" Intellectual Life, The," 188. 

Iowa, library work in, 92. 

Irving, Washington, and Sparks, 65 ; 
his books once badly printed, 81 ; 
his standing in England, 99,102 ; his 
" Grenada," 118 ; his " Washing- 
ton," 153, 172. 

Italy, number of books published in, 

3- 
Ives, Brayton, 155, 161. 

" JACK HARKAWAY," 39. 
Jackson, Helen Hunt, 93. 
" Jane Eyre," 120. 



252 



INDEX 



" Janice Meredith," 24. 

Jeffrey, Francis, 47, 290. 

Jesuit Missionaries, 173. 

"Jesuit Relations, The," 175-177. 

Jogues, Father Isaac, his martyrdom, 
174. 

Johnson, Samuel, 42; the man, not 
the author, survives, 64, 184; and 
Chesterfield, 216-217, 2 4°> 243- 

Johnson, William, 96. 

Jonson, Ben, 61, 62, 225. 

Jumonville, Coulon de, death of, 174. 

Keats, John, 166. 

Kelmscott Press, the, 84. 

Kendall, Amos, 37. 

Kilmarnock, Burns's poems printed 

at, 22, 151, 152, 198. 
Kilpatrick, Nellie, Burns's associate, 

203. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 17, 22, 39, 81, 157. 
Knox, John, 187. 

" Lady Greygown," 89. 

Lake George, battle of, 173. 

Lake Placid Club, the, 88. 

Lakewood-on-Chautauqua, 87. 

Lamb, Charles, 12, 73-74, 92. 

Landor, Walter Savage, 12, 99 ; where 
he is not known, 106, 115. 

Lang, Andrew, 58, 157. 

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 47. 

Lecky, W. E. H., 58. 

Lee, Sidney, and Lord Herbert 
of Cherbury, 224, 225, 227, 232. 

Lenox, James, 176. 

" Letter of Columbus, The," value 
of, 163. 

" Letters from under a Bridge," 
Willis's book, 101. 

Librarians, their work and influence, 
86-93 '< a restraining force on poor 
books, 106; dependence of, on 
reviews, 107. 

Library of Congress, 11. 

" Library Week," 88. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 47, 121; the Nico- 
lay and Hay life of, 141, 142; Hern- 
don's life of, 143-145. 



Lippincott, J. B., Company, 16. 
Lockhart, John Gibson, 200. 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 22, 
33; article by, on Hawthorne, 35, 

39. 155- 
Long Island, south shore of, scene of 

Margaret Fuller's death, 125. 
Longmans, Green & Co., 16. 
Lorenzo de' Medici, 148. 
Louisbourg, siege of, 173. 
Louis Napoleon, and Talleyrand, 193. 
Lovelace, Earl of, and Byron, 69. 
Lowell, James Russell, 50, 53, 93 ; 

his " Letters," 189, 190. 
Luther, Martin, 187. 
" Lyrics of Lowly Life," 23, 106. 

Mabie, Hamilton W., 89. 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, stories 
of his reading, 31, 133 ; money 
from his books, 134, 172, 241, 243, 

245- 

McCarthy, Justin, 58. 

Macdonald, George, 58. 

McKinley, William, 86. 

Maclaren, Ian, 17. 

Macmillan, Frederick, 6. 

Magdalen College, Oxford, 206. 

Mahan, Captain A. T., his equip- 
ment as historian, 135 ; his " Life 
of Nelson," 136, 139; how he be- 
came an author, 137-139. 

Marat, Dr. Jean Paul, 68. 

Marbot, Baron, his " Memoirs," 193. 

Marcus Aurelius, 240. 

" Margaret Ogilvy," 194. 

Masson, David, his " Life of Milton," 
141. 

Matthews, Brander, 92. 

Mauchline, Burns's home, 198, 203. 

Medwin, Thomas, 184. 

" Memories of Old Friends," 195. 

Meteyard, Eliza, 8. 

Metternich, Prince, his "Memoirs," 

193- 
Michaelangelo, 146. 
" Michael Strogoff," 40. 
Milton, John, payments to, for his 

" Paradise Lost," and the value of 



INDEX 



253 



copies of the first edition now, 20, 
21, 22, 23 ; few who read, 29, 49, 60, 
71, 115, 119, 120; Masson's life of, 
141, 155, 164; the man as great as 
the writer, 182, 184, 198. 

Minuit, Peter, 176. 

" Mr. Isaacs," 24. 

Moliere, Jean B. P., 117. 

Montaigne, Michel de, 41, 42. 

Moore, Thomas, 69, 184. 

Morley, John, 58. 

Morris, William, 83-85. 

Mossgiel, Burns's home, 198, 203, 
204. 

Motley, John Lothrop, 172. 

Mount Oliphant, Burns's home, 201, 
202. 

Miiller, Max, 190. 

Murdock, , Burns's teacher, 202. 

Murray, John, 31. 

Nansen, Fridjof, profits of, from 

his books, 20-21, 22. 
Napoleon Bonaparte, influence of his 

wars on books, 12, 183, 193. 
National Institute of Arts and Letters, 

the, 105. 
Nelson, Horatio, Viscount, lives of, 

I3 6 . I 37- 

" New England Magazine, The," 35. 

New Haven, 95. 

New York, centre of the book busi- 
ness, 6, 15-16 ; Willis in, 96. 

New York Library Association, the, 
88-91. 

" New York Times, The," vii. 

Nicolay, John G., 141, 142. 

" North American Review, The," 35. 

O'Callaghan, Dr. Edmund Bai- 
ley, 177. 

" Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 
The," 106. 

Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret Wilson, 128 ; 
her devoted life, 129; her want of 
illusions, 130; her lack of literary 
ambition, 131; the woman side of, 
132. 

Omar Khayyam, 119. 



Osborne, Dorothy, her "Letters," 

196. 
"Our Mutual Friend," 39. 

Palestine, 117. 

Palgrave, Francis Turner, 74-76. 

" Pall Mall Gazette, The," 57. 

Pantheon, the Roman, 116. 

Parkman, Francis, 133, 135 ; value of 
his writings, 172-175 ; his use of the 
" Jesuit Relations," 176, 241. 

Parthenon, the, 116. 

Paul Veronese, 146. 

Peck, Harry Thurston, 89. 

" Pencillings by the Way," Willis's 
book, 101. 

Pennsylvania railroad, the, 37. 

Pepperill, Sir William, 174. 

Pepys, Samuel, his " Diary," 184, 
189, 206-213; his character and 
position, 209-211; merit of his 
" Diary," 213. 

Perry, Commodore O. H., 139. 

Philadelphia, a former centre of book- 
publishing, 15. 

Philip II., 68. 

Phillips, Stephen, 23. 

Pierce, Edward L., his " Life of Sum- 
ner," 141. 

Pitt, William, 237, 245. 

Plato, 29. 

Poe, Edgar A., his "Tamerlane," 
22, 95; Willis's kindness to, 101, 
198. 

Poinsett, J. R., 36. 

Pontiac, his conspiracy, 174. 

Pope, Alexander, 191, 202. 

Prescott, William H., his histories, 
133, 172, 241. 

" Pride and Prejudice," 127. 

Princeton, 148. 

Providence Public Library, the, 108. 

Publishers, manuscripts they reject, 
6 ; making better books, 10 ; those 
in several cities, 15-16; relations 
with authors, 26-28. 

Pusey, Dr. Edward B., 190. 

Putnam, Herbert, 86. 

Putnam's Sons, G. P., 16. 



254 



INDEX 



Quaritch, Bernard, 165. 
" Quincy Adams Sawyer," 24. 
" Quo Vadis," immorality of, 43-45, 
47- 

Raphael Sanzio, 146. 
" Rasselas," 65. 
Reade, Charles, 39. 
Remusat, Madame de, he/ "Me- 
moirs," 193. 
Revere, Paul, 154. 
"Richard Carvel," 24. 
Richardson, Dr. E. C, quoted, 3. 
Richebourg, Emile, his popularity, 

39. 4i. 
Richelieu, Duke de, 231. 
" Richmond Enquirer, The," 37. 
Ripley, George, 50. 
Ritchie, " Father," 36, 37. 
Rives, W. C, 36. 

Robespierre, Maximilien M. I., 191. 
Rogers, Samuel, quoted, 13. 
Rome, 117. 

Roxburghe Club, the, 157. 
Ruskin, John, 8, 58, 92; quoted, 127. 

St. John's College, Cambridge, 
206. 

St. Mark's at Venice, 116. 

" St. Paul Globe, The," vii. 

St. Peter's at Rome, 116. 

Sanborn, Frank B., 92. 

Sand, George, 131. 

Sansovino, Andrea, 146. 

" Sant' Ilario," 24. 

" Sartor Resartus," 31, 50, 51. 

" Scarlet Letter, The," 33, 34, 50, 
156. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 12, 13, 23, 123; 
his recognition of Jane Austen, 
25, 27, 49, 92; quoted, 128; still 
widely read, 179-180; his intellec- 
tual integrity, 181 ; his Edinburgh 
home, 182; and Burns, 200, 210, 
241. 

Scribner's Sons, Charles, 16. 

Scudder, Horace E., 92. 

Sebastopol, siege of, 121. 

Selborne, White's book about, 38. 



"Septimius Felton," 32. 

Shairp, John C, 201, 204. 

Shakespeare, William, 29; publica- 
tion of the first folio, 60-62 ; editors 
of, 63, 71, 78, 117; quoted, 118, 
120 ; cost of a second folio, 168, 245. 

Sheffield, Lord, and Gibbon, 234, 235. 

Shelley, Percy B., his " Alastor," 32 ; 
his " Adonais," 156. 

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 237. 

Sherwood, Mrs. John, her " Me- 
moirs," 195. 

Sienkiewicz, Henry, 39, 43, 44. 

Sinclair, Catherine, 8. 

Skeat, W. W., 58. 

Smith, Captain John, 206. 

Smollett, Tobias, 181, 262. 

Social Science Association, the, 103. 

Solomon, king of Israel, 120. 

Southey, Robert, 12, 136. 

Sparks, Jared, 65, 236. 

Spencer, Herbert, 58. 

Springfield, Mass., City Library of, 
109. 

Stanley, Henry M., profits from his 
books, 21, 22. 

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, her remi- 
niscences, 195, 197. 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 74. 

Stephen, Leslie, 58. 

Stephens, H. Morse, 68. 

Sterne, Laurence, 42, 184. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 17; his 
" Letters," 46, 81 ; his death, 122, 
157. 189. 

Stewart, Dugald, 199, 200. 

Stockton, Frank R., 39, 89. 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 93. 

Stratford, Shakespeare's birthplace, 
38, 201. 

Strickland, Agnes, 7. 

Stubbs, William, 58. 

Sumner, Charles, 141, 142. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 58. 

Tacitus, Cornelius, 133, 134. 
Talleyrand-Perigord, Prince, his 

" Memoirs," 192, 194. 
" Tam O'Shanter," 201. 



INDEX 



255 



Tasso, Torquato, 191. 

" Temple Classics, The," 78. 

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 8, 22, 39; 
and Palgrave, 75, 152; memoir of, 
189, 190. 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 24 ; 
quoted, 41, 115 ; collectors of, 155, 
157 ; his sarcasm, 181 ; his praise 
of " Tom Jones," 211, 230. 

Thomas, Annie, 8. 

Thomson, James, 154. 

Thompson, George, 25. 

Thoreau, Henry David, 34. 

"Through South Africa," 21. 

Thucydides, 133, 134. 

Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 177. 

Tintoretto, 146. 

"To Have and To Hold," 24. 

" Toilers of the Sea, The," 192. 

" Token, The," 33. 

Tolstoi, Leo, Count, his seventieth 
birthday, 122-123. 

" Tom Jones," 78, 211. 

"Trade List Annual, The," 5. 

Trevelyan, Sir George O., 58. 

Trollope, Anthony, 7. 

" True George Washington, The," 67. 

" Twice-Told Tales," 25, 32, 35. 

Uffizi Palace, the, 147. 

Van Buren, Martin, 36. 
Vandals, the, 153. 
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 163. 
Van Dyke, Henry, 89, 105, 106. 
" Vanity Fair," 39. 

Vasari, Giorgio, his lives of artists, 
145-149 ; as an artist, 146. 



Verne, Jules, 40. 
Virgil, 116, 118, 120. 

Walker, Charles Clement, 60. 

Walpole, Horace, 216, 224, 228, 
240. 

Walton, Izaak, his " Angler," 155. 

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 17, 24. 

Warner, Charles Dudley, 105. 

Warren, Samuel, 7. 

Washington, George, his writings, 
65 ; Weems's life of, 137 ; his book- 
plate, 154 ; and the battle of Great 
Meadows, 174. 

Waterloo, Battle of, 12. 

Waukesha, Wis., 87. 

" Waverley Novels, The," 106, 182. 

Webster, Daniel, 195. 

Weems, Mason L., his "Life of 
Washington," 137. 

Western Union Telegraph, the, 37. 

Wheatley, Henry B., 208. 

Whipple, Edwin P., 50. 

White, Gilbert, 37-38. 

Whittier, John G., 93. 

Wiggin, Kate Douglass, 92. 

Willis, Nathaniel Parker, the pathos 
of his fate, 94-103 ; an ephemeral 
writer, 94; his early success, 96- 
97; his life abroad, 98-100; Bos- 
ton's dislike of him, 101. 

Winchester, England, 126. 

Wolfe, James, General, his victory at 
Quebec, 173, 174. 

Wordsworth, William, 12 ; his hum- 
ble home, 40, 49, 70, 115. 

Wycliffe, John, his translation of the 
Bible, 168. 



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